There’s a scarcity of out ballerinas. Queer the Ballet is trying to change that.
At Queer the Ballet, LGBTQ performers challenge the expectations of traditional ballet while creating work all their own, including Dream of a Common Language.
As a young ballet dancer, Adriana Pierce lived with two separate selves: the dancer at rehearsal and then, outside the studio, the queer woman exploring her identity. She did not think it possible for both selves to meet.
“I regret how I felt in ballet spaces during that time, because I had to leave so much of the best parts of me outside. I don’t think ballet got the best parts of me, and that’s a shame,” said Pierce, the founder and artistic director of Queer the Ballet, an organization promoting LGBTQ representation and visibility in professional ballet.
As Pierce spoke, a troupe of queer dancers rehearsed in the next studio, preparing for a performance of “Dream of a Common Language,” a new ballet directed by Pierce and inspired by the 1970s poetry of lesbian writer Adrienne Rich. Both the ballet, which opens Friday, and Rich’s collection grapple with a search for community.
The performance is part of Pierce’s ongoing mission to create opportunities for queer women, transgender people and nonbinary professional dancers to meet and perform together, something made more difficult, she said, by the traditional nature of the ballet world, with its strict gender roles and narrow definition of femininity.
Adriana Pierce founded Queer the Ballet in 2020 to help promote LGBTQ representation and visibility in professional ballet. Domenick Fini / NBC News“Ballet likes to put people in boxes, and gender is a very specific box that ballet likes to define. And it’s women and it’s men, and the women look a certain way, dance a certain way, behave a certain way,” Pierce said.
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