by Adriana Pierce

One sunny morning, several years ago, I was walking down Ocean Drive holding hands with a woman. I was dancing with Miami City Ballet at the time, and it was a much-needed day off. We strolled down the iconic South Beach strip, and a man sitting on the porch of a hotel began yelling obscenities at us. This is not an unusual experience for two young women walking down a city street, so it took me a few moments to realize that he was actually spewing homophobic slurs at us. We are taught to keep our heads down and walk faster in these situations, but this man took our lack of response personally and turned his slurs into hostile threats and insults while we quickened our pace. He advanced towards us as we passed, and his shouts culminated in one last biting put-down: “Oh, I bet your mother is really proud of you.”

Not all of my experiences as a queer woman have been as blatantly hostile, but working as one of the only openly queer women in professional ballet has certainly been far from easy. Ballet has always been entrenched in tradition. While this may serve to uphold a technical standard, rigid conformity makes it difficult for the artform to evolve, especially when it comes to expressing sexual identity and presenting gender equality. Just over a year ago, choreographer Alexei Ratmansky stated, “there is no such thing as equality in ballet… and I am very comfortable with that.” Along with this comment, he included a photoshopped picture of a classical ballerina supporting a male dancer high above her head with one arm, and some remarks about how men should do the lifting and escorting and women should dance on pointe, “not the other way around.”

Understandably, these statements made by such a high-profile choreographer sent ripples throughout the ballet community. It is his prerogative to perpetuate outdated and arguably harmful gender stereotypes in his own work, and he will be responsible for the fallout of those choices. The problem comes when we allow this narrow-minded thinking to shape the conversation that we all need to be having about ballet’s future. When did art become something that should be comfortable? Adhering to tradition is not so important that it is worth alienating the people and stories that might encourage ballet to grow and remain culturally relevant. I believe in ballet’s ability to preserve its integrity while also serving as an essential cultural voice, but in order to do that we must embrace diversity and explore the boundless potential of the art form instead of its limits. Ballet will survive without the sexism, homophobia, and stifling reliance on normative gender presentation – and I can say that with confidence because, as a queer woman who has experienced all of those things, my very existence in this professional space directly challenges established thinking.

I came out to my friends while I was a student at the School of American Ballet. There is a large community of cis gay men in concert dance, but there were no women in my life who were openly queer. Thank goodness for the weekly premiering episodes of Showtime’s The L Word which I anxiously streamed online, and the RENT original Broadway cast album – the only things that made me feel connected to a larger community. If there were women like me in professional ballet, no one was talking about it, so it was hard to know how my peers at SAB would react.

News got around fast, and even though my friends were supportive, I didn’t speak about my sexuality in front of many people. When I did bring it up, I was extremely self-deprecating. I felt the need to stave off the discomfort that I was sure the people around me felt, and I made jokes about my attraction to women in the hope that other students would not. I realize now that I wanted to control the space my identity occupied because I was afraid what would happen if I didn’t. Looking back, I can see all the anger and self-hatred that my feelings of isolation generated within myself and my relationships as I tried to reconcile the disparities between how I felt and the life I thought I wanted. Being a teenager is a tough time for everyone, but for young LGBTQ+ people, adolescence is often an especially volatile period of self-discovery. I remember staring in the mirror and repeating out loud, trying to convince my reflection, “I’m gay. I’m gay. It doesn’t make sense, but I’m gay.”

Gossip about my sexuality made its rounds in New York City Ballet before I even got there to start my apprenticeship. My year at NYCB was the first time that I was dancing professionally and the first time that I was meeting people who didn’t know me before I came out. Just like at SAB, I didn’t ever talk about my sexuality, especially with the other women in the company. I was deathly afraid that they would be uncomfortable or react poorly towards me, and since there were no other openly queer women for me to refer to, I had no reason to think that they wouldn’t. I quickly realized that there was very little space for diverse gender expression, or diversity in general, and I had a hell of a time trying to figure out who I was while working in an environment that didn’t seem to have room for me. When I moved to Miami to dance with Miami City Ballet, I began to recognize the ways that my queerness intersected with the sexism that I already knew to be embedded in the fabric of ballet’s traditions. Suddenly my body and behavior were scrutinized in a way that made my identity feel wildly unstable.

It is undeniable that women in ballet are held to incredibly high, and often unreachable, standards. Women are worked harder and for longer (in their pointe shoes, no less) and are held to a higher technical standard than their male peers. There are also expectations of beauty, weight, physical proportion, attitude, and even wardrobe choice, and as a young queer woman, I found those standards to be particularly crippling. Professional dancers expect their dancing to be subject to harsh criticism because that is how you improve. Indeed, the mark of a productive class or rehearsal is when you receive corrections on the work that you do. It was extremely troubling to me, however, when critiques were directed at my body and presentation, instead of my technique.

There was that time when it was suggested that I should wear more makeup in order to get cast in more parts; the time when it was said that I am “not sexy enough” for a certain corps de ballet role; and also that time when someone apparently said, “Is she a lesbian? Because she looks like one.” I won’t take the time to unpack these comments here, but I will say that they made blossoming-queer-lady, body-dysmorphia-ridden, 21-year-old me not only angry but also damagingly self-conscious. For years I would worry that I stood out in a negative way from the other women in the company, or that my dancing would somehow give my identity away, or suggest that I didn’t belong.

It took me a long time to figure out that my identity does, in fact, set me apart – and that is not a bad thing. I finally realized that who I love, how I love, and the choices that I make about how to present myself are a part of my work and my dancing. Being a queer woman inherently informs everything that I do because it is the lens through which I see the world. I am different, and I am proud of that, but I often feel very alone. The homophobia that I experience is compounded by sexism in a way that isolates me even from the gay men in my field of work, and makes it hard to connect with the other women about it. It is not because my straight women peers don’t care about the issues; rather, it’s because they cannot possibly understand what it feels like to have to constantly defend the validity of their identity both inside the ballet studio and during a day-off stroll on the beach. I am always working to create a world for myself that feels empowering and safe, in spite of the rigidity of my craft and the homophobia which still pervades our culture. And it is important to underline that the subtle ways in which homophobia shows itself can be as damaging as when an aggressive man charges at you and questions whether your mother is proud of you. Spoiler alert: she is.

It has been difficult for me to accept the isolation that I felt while dancing in the ballet world. I love the art form so deeply, and as I reflect on my career, I realize that it simply does not have to be this way. We can have broader representation in leadership and in the narratives that we produce onstage, accomplished, in part, by investing in creative voices that may sound different from the cis male choreographers who currently dominate the field. We should be encouraging a more expansive range of storytelling, and developing work that both exists outside of, and challenges the gender binary in a way that is not tokenizing but genuine and inclusive. Ballet needs to reckon with the treatment of women to truly usher itself into the #metoo era, and finally take a good, hard look at whether our partnering choreography allows each partner to have equal agency. In addition, I feel it is imperative that we challenge the manners in which dancers are coached, directed, and supported. Corrections given to dancers should be exclusively movement-based or style-based, and our leaders and colleagues must be held accountable for their behavior. The most important change we can make, though, is that when someone identifies a comment or choreographic thought as offensive, harmful, or narrow, we should actually LISTEN.

I want these things for ballet. I want them for the young people entering into a professional life as a dancer and for the diverse audiences with whom we should be sharing our art. And I want all of this for the others like me, who have been here questioning and defying tradition with dignity and pride. We are here, and it’s time we are meaningfully included in the conversation.

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ADRIANA PIERCE RECENTLY APPEARED IN THE FX SHOW FOSSE/VERDON AND WILL BE APPEARING IN STEVEN SPIELBERG’S FILM ADAPTATION OF “WEST SIDE STORY” NEXT YEAR. A NEW COMMISSION OF HER WORK WILL PREMIERE AT CAROLINA BALLET DURING THEIR 2019/2020 SEASON. FOLLOW HER CAREER AT WWW.ADRIANAPIERCE.COM AND ON INSTAGRAM @ADRIPRC

First published on blog.conversationsondancepod.com

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