The Brooklyn Rail

It is dim outside, and the coldness of the air makes the Manhattan Bridge dazzling, with rows of cars moving and honking hectically. In the midst of the evening, the moon is already glimmering among skyscrapers while Ballez dancers are warming up behind the theater curtains. The Ballez company, an ensemble of trans and non-binary dancers, took the stage at Chelsea Factory, reimagining one of the most classic and canonical ballets of all time, Coppélia. This is not the first time they have performed the piece, nor the first time I am attending it. Nonetheless, each time you see a dance is different: you, the dancers, and the world has changed. Entering the theater, I can already sense a shift in the atmosphere, as if I was new to a dance form I have been practicing for decades. I am no longer cold, but rather can feel the warmth of the bodies preparing to take on the space. There is a voice, and then, blackness.

The first thing I see is a doll staring at me. The dancers are standing still, smirking to the public while a couple of piano notes start to melt in the back. The atmosphere—the theater, the lighting, and the huge crowd of people—makes me feel as if I came to watch a faithful retelling of the E.T.A. Hoffmann story (on which the original production was based). However, I am definitely not. One doll comes downstage, and starts to do some ballet movements: plié, pas de bourrée, attitude, and so on. The energy is different from the steps I have seen onstage and performed in class. Rather than fragile and ethereal, they are energetic, bold and dynamic, and so are the costumes and attire of the performers: more blousy and subdued than the traditionally used ones.

While Coppélia was originally staged in 1870 Paris and performed only by female ballerinas, the cast of Travesty Doll Play Ballez (after Coppélia) by Katy Pyle is formed by a gender-nonconforming ensemble. Pyle, the founder of Ballez already warns us in the program notes: “Ballez brings [Coppélia’s] his/her/theirstory to light with an entirely trans and non-binary cast, making clear that gender variance and transgression have long been a part of ballet.” Pyle reconceptualizes the story, infusing it with the complexity of gender nonconformity stories in ballet history, defying cisheteronormativity and white privilege. However, this is not a mere reinterpretation, but rather, the coming-back-to-life of the original ballerina of Coppélia, Eugénie Fiocre, who from 1864–1875 performed both female and male roles, as was common during the one hundred-year period of the “travesti” era.

In the middle of the stage, an ensemble of six dolls dance classical combinations that one could see at a traditional ballet. The dolls’ intention lies in the delicacy of the épaulements, pirouettes, and interactions with each other. There is a doll, the magic one, that jumps from upstage to downstage. This doll embodies the ever-changing quality of gender dissidence: coming from a big jump to a gentle port de bras, challenging the structure of ballet standardizations, which intertwine the idea of pure lines and elevation. Then, one of the dolls pulls their skirt out, discovering the underwear and revealing a male-dancer silhouette who does not stop moving, enjoying the moment of playfulness that the petit allegro brings to them. Among gargouillades and sauts-de-chat, the six dolls fall and recover until the doll maker—performed by Pyle—comes into play, trying to scrutinize whether the bodies are apt for dancing by approaching them and observing their limbs and lines. The exploration of power dynamics highlights gender constrictions, with ballet moves often being either hyper-feminine or hyper-masculine. The choreographer has attributed this to the perceptions of Western nineteenth-century ballerinas, which preconceived masculinity in ballet as strong, energetic steps that make the male bodies look vigorous whilst females looked weak and untouchable. In order to preserve heteronormativity, the balletic body had to be controlled under archetypal characters; males were princes and females were princesses. The precarity of self-determination in classical Western dance has pushed choreographers such Pyle to come up with alternatives for gender rebellion.

This is not the first time that gender has been under pressure in concert dance productions. The pioneering company Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, with an all-male cast, has famously performed for fifty years iconic ballets like Swan Lake and Giselle, complete with pointe shoes, further questioning and satirizing gender norms within the ballet world, as well as the perennial The Hard Nut—a satirized The Nutcracker—performed by the Mark Morris Dance Company. Similarly, in 2013, Ohad Naharin choreographed Momo for the Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv, featuring male dancers in tutus, a costume typically reserved for female performers. This powerful visual subversion highlighted the arbitrary nature of gendered costuming in ballet, which Pyle also plays with in the dressing and undressing of the dolls. But what has interested me most in Travesty Doll Play Ballez (after Coppélia) is its capacity to reject the imperial history of ballet—born from the European court and based on ideals of binarism—and work from and with the margins, opposing both gender and form, confronting the rigid codification of ballet’s movements and narratives.

With music composed and performed live by Scott Killian and Lavinia Eloise Bruce, Travesty Doll Play Ballez (after Coppélia) oscillates between classical and electronic sounds, merging them with the ambivalent atmosphere of the production. The de-gendering not only blossoms in the quality of the movement, but also through the ways in which the bodies perform the music and, of course, the music itself. In place of a differentiation from the classical to the electronic standard, what comes through during the piece is the submissive impulse to become one with the ensemble, to let go of the binary constriction that has oppressed people throughout society. It is the binomial relationship of contraries that has been predominant in Western thought: classical versus contemporary, male versus female, energetic versus ethereal. During the piece, a feeling of dispossession takes hold, one that starts building on the inclusion of each character. From the infamous Barbara Kruger’s visual artwork Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground) (1989), designed to fight for women’s right to own their bodies, to Travesty Doll Play Ballez (after Coppélia), created to (re)imagine ballet tradition, dissident bodies have always been territories of reappropriation. Both for Pyle and the Ballez ensemble, there is a constant effort to reacquire one’s stolen identity from patriarchy.

As the ballet goes by, Coppélia leads to a reconception of the nineteenth-century world, rewriting—or, better said, re-orienting—the original story to a new more open and diverse one. As Pyle claims on Ballez’s site, the relationship between the dolls and their dollmaker explores “cycles of abuse between teachers and students, on control and freedom, on fake and real, and on perpetually being forced to automate the performance of gender in order to belong.” In a special moment toward the end, dancers Cove Barton and Arzu Salman perform a duet. Both Baron and Salman dance to each other. By their presence, they not only defy gender normativity but also imperial ballet narrativity, opposing the idea of duet, which in the Western canon has implied one male and one female. There is so much to say about Travesty Doll Play Ballez (after Coppélia), and much to be discussed on whether queering ballet is possible. For now, Pyle and the company dancers show us that there is something inherently queer about dance, something that nineteenth-century ballerinas such as Eugénie Fiocre knew way before we did.