My Lesbian Experience with “Giselle of Loneliness”

Ballet is not a sport nor an artform designed “for the gays”—and the desperation to uphold patriarchal, ethnocentric traditions in costume, choreography, and tale only support it. When ballet became popular in the early 19th century, it was largely attributed to “the [female] dancer’s revealing costume” and the “fine leg” seen under a tutu that shortened with the artform’s progression (Mears, 2013). Its stories depict a similarly vapid characterization of its female protagonists. A classic tale, Giselle, depicts the title character as a simple, passionate girl with a weak heart, and the female spirits that she joins after her passing, the Willis, as cruel murderers consumed by revenge. The ballet revolves less about her than about the ill-fated romance between her and a disguised prince: her key moments in her tale are her two solo performances danced out of love for the prince and when she forgives and frees him from the asphyxiating Willis.

Giselle of Loneliness is a 2021 retelling that criticizes this. The tale centers on seven variations of the second performance: the difficult one where Giselle, heartbroken over her prince’s deception, dances hysterically until her heart gives way. There is no prince in Giselle of Loneliness, and there are no horrified villagers to bury her. The prince is the embodiment of ballet itself: “that thing you love until it crushes your spirit” (Kourlas, 2021). The seven dancers of an identical choreography dance for a virtual audience’s love, artistically baring injured hearts and souls so the audience votes to give them the part. A rural village surrounded by an unhallowed forest is a hollow stage beneath a hundred small screens. The villagers, or the Willis, are a swarm of voyeuristic eyes, and they doom Giselle to dance to her death again and again. Just as notably, not every Giselle fits the childish, waif character the antiquated male-dominated audience expects of her. At least three do not use she or her. At least one presents masculinely. And many identify as queer or transgender. None embody the dainty, pale ballerina with the fine leg yearned for centuries ago; any who believe they do will retract that when each bleeds out for the audience, desperate for their performance to be marked as the most “virginal”. Giselle of Loneliness is the antithesis of classical ballet and its attempts to outcast those beyond the audience’s desire—and it encapsulates the goals of its performing company, Ballez, perfectly.

“Ballez”, states its website, is “all the queers that ballet has left out” (Ballez, 2024a). The company, founded in 2011 by Katy Pyle, a genderqueer lesbian using they/them pronouns, features experimental dance rooted in classical and modern technique. Pyle is the company’s lead choreographer, having tailored classical reimaginings and original works such as The Firebird, Slavic Goddesses, and the aforementioned Giselle of Loneliness. As the company’s name (a portmanteau of ballet and a lesbian pejorative) and its mission statement suggest, its memberbase is composed of primarily queer, non-conforming dancers, choreographers, and teachers. Not every member is queer, and they do not necessarily need to be. Pyle themselves created Ballez as a fluid term for a company and a technique; in the particular case of the latter, Pyle described it as a way to “explore ballet outside of heteronormative constructs” (Alterowitz, 2014). In Pyle’s eyes, if a dancer is willing to observe and perform ballet through a queer lens, and to dance and to reincorporate those abandoned by the normative lens into the world of ballet, then what should stop them from joining? This logic opens Ballez to dancers like previous member Alexandra Waterbury, who does not openly identify outside of the gender and sexuality binaries as other members do, but went against the binary of ballet companies itself in a 2018 lawsuit for sexual harassment. People like Waterbury can join the company, and others can watch and learn with them.

Ballez’s work emphasizes community. It would have been a major oversight if it did not in the context of queer theory and American queer history. It would have even been a critical flaw: Ballez is centered in Brooklyn, New York City, about an hour away from the Stonewall National Monument. But Ballez’s fluid logic and mission extends outside of the stage and the studio, spiting the costs of traveling to downtown New York City and attending a small-studio performance or a professional class. In an attempt to reach out to youth dancers outside of Ballez’s teaching abilities, Pyle organized a Kickstarter to produce a free 13-episode series of instructional, inspirational videos for young queer dancers. The Kickstarter succeeded, and Ballez Class Everywhere was posted through 2019. It featured nine dancers, two non-white, many gender non-conforming, and all featured equally through the series; the Kickstarter ensured that all nine downtown-based performers were compensated fairly for their work (Schwartz, 2021). As of writing this essay, the introductory video has over 7,400 views, and the hosting channel has been recommended alongside other instructional dance channels to YouTube audiences worldwide. Ballez also donates performance tickets when possible to low-income and LGBTQ+ youth in New York City, increasing awareness of both the company and the themes of classical ballet that it seeks to overturn (Ballez, 2024b).

Ballez’s radical approach to an artform six centuries old faces an excruciatingly uphill battle. Ballet companies and their higher-ups maintain the binary, patriarchal, cisheteronormative, Eurocentric, and ethnocentric structure of classical ballet from a local to global scale—and they have no reason not to. Choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, who was pulled as New York’s star-studded American Ballet Theatre resident artist from 2009 to 2023, clashed with Pyle for saying, “there is no such thing as equality in ballet: women dance on point, men lift and support women. women receive flowers, men escort women off stage. not the other way around” (Ratmansky, 2017). The Facebook post was deleted following criticism from many other readers, but Pyle, whose online and offline classes feature non-binary, fluid partnering and equal opportunity for choreography, managed to respond, “if you are the future of ballet I hope it dies”—and incited an unknown response back, denting the marble-made foundation of classical constructs (Schwartz, 2021). Unfortunately, Ratmansky is not the only one directing the future of ballet, but merely emblematic of it. His ideology and picture as a white, cisgender male with power and an intent to maintain a specific hierarchal dynamic is mass-produced in the global culture of dance. Since its inception, Ballez’s reimaginings have been criticized as inelegant, unappealing, and ultimately “‘bad’ ballet” (Werther, 2017). Compared to the work of American Ballet Theatre soloists in performances and media such as the 2010 film Black Swan, where even in the frenzied and sexually charged performances of Odette and Odile, the soloists must remain graceful and unaffected, Ballez’s work must seem terrible indeed.

But these reviews for Ballez’s Sleeping Beauty and the Beast miss the experimental and critical points. Ballez is not about maintaining the aesthete of typical ballet; Ballez is a technique which appropriates, but remains independent of classical and contemporary ballet, and in every way it strives to differ from it. Pyle’s choreography, rooted in years of collegiate study, embraces its high technical requirements, blemishes and all. Ballez is about abandoning all attempts to please a heterosexual male gaze for lesbian love and pornographic clichés (Fisher & Jacobs, 2011) and injecting camp aesthetic into an artform that historically postulates as aristocratic fine art. Its very foundation dooms it as a work to be critiqued for viewers who do not see it through campy, non-normative eyes. Ballez is too ugly to embody classical ballet. Pyle, Werther, and their colleagues ask, with a knowing grin and the tenacity to dance again: is that not the point?

There are certainly things worth critiquing about Ballez. For a company that includes “all the queers… left out” of mainstream ballet, its present diversity runs thin. This is difficult to manage when a company only has six members, but of the members listed on the company’s website page, a majority are white. Of its past members, about seven out of nineteen are non-white (Ballez, 2024a). Admittedly, this problem undercuts ballet as a whole: non-white performers, especially Black and Indigenous performers, struggle to reach professional ranks, let alone get their foot in the door. The intersection of non-white and queer performers who survive this is even smaller, and even more difficult without proper support. The kind of support necessary to introduce more intersectional dancers to professional ballet is not a worldwide one, and it did not exist for dancers of Pyle’s age or older—it certainly did not for me, a closeted lesbian, then closeted transmasculine dancer who never found kin before dropping out. But this kind of criticism still warrants considering: even if Pyle’s approach to destroying classical binaries follows a “queer, temporal framework”, the framework holds relevance to many: non-white performers both inside and out of the crossover with queer identity can benefit. For intersectional performers to benefit, however, emphasis should be made to support and encourage them to work with Ballez however they can.

Having said all this, one’s mind returns to the original production of Giselle and its dainty, fine-legged love interest by the same name. For as many critiques as can be lobbied towards the presentation of Ballez’s company members, it feels impossible to deem any a perfect fit for Giselle. Even if one matched her ethnocentric, lovesick, virginal appearance top-down, would they fit? To me, Ballez’s existence as a company and a technique denies this. As a queer lesbian who never came out to his ballet studio until leaving, as a performer who sees himself reflected in many of the company members and work, and as a person who, were he white, might perfectly resemble the petite, frail, feminine love interest, I could never see myself in the role. I still remember attempting her debut variation en pointe, and I remember understudying for the Willis. I would have taken the role in a heartbeat if I was given it. But even though my career as a dancer was flooded with a love for the art, I would never have managed to immerse myself in her part. Giselle’s pushover, easy-to-forgive love for the prince, a cisgender male stranger who betrays her, is one I could never imagine.

But if I was asked to play the part of an auditioning Giselle for Ballez, I could. When I read about Giselle of Loneliness, the reviews cut through like a knife. Kourlas (2021) states, “Albrecht [the prince] represents ballet: that thing you love until it crushes your spirit”. When I took a break from writing this essay, I would see him, and I would remember how my dreams in dance had died. One performer, Maxfield Haynes, wrote in their biography, “Ballet to me is like a prison with flowers.” They had to dance in flat shoes because choreographers saw them as a man. It was the exact opposite for me. And when Kourlas compliments the ending of Pyle’s show, she says the most prominent element of their choreography is, “There is joy and abandon. Vulnerability? Always.” The choreography is visceral in energy and visceral in emotion. My studio wanted me to dance with joy, always. In the brief days I danced, I danced with this and raw fury and spirit, and I was pushed out for it. So, if Ballez can weaponize and transform raw energy, emotion, and vulnerability, then I know they can succeed—and I want to see a generation of dance sculpted by their gaze, the kind that I could imagine myself and all other dropout Giselles in. A future where Ballez’s goal comes true is a future that could free a childhood me from his betrayal, and it is one I will always believe in.