Ballez creator Katy Pyle on women as makers and using ballet to explore new power structures
In 2015, I interviewed Katy Pyle after dance class at Gibney Dance Studio where she had been teaching wildly energizing Ballez classes to students with formal ballet training, some ballet experience, and no dance experience at all. (You can now take Ballez classes at Brooklyn Arts Exchange). I wanted to learn more about the creative and healing potential of Ballez and hear Katy’s thoughts on what women do with power in and outside of the dance world from a queer perspective. The conversation that follows happened over strawberry lemonade in City Hall Park near Wall Street and is over two years old/right on time.
Lex Schroeder: What is your definition of power?
Katy Pyle: For me, it comes back to dance… building and making. There’s been an illusion of power belonging to one person in the history of dance companies and dance-making processes. And in my experience as a performer — since that’s been a lot of my life — I’m always contributing and everyone else in the room is contributing. There’s a group of people who come together physically and mentally to make something happen.
But what happens is that power gets claimed and owned by one person who is the director. It’s usually the choreographer. And this is [unfortunate because people think] this one person has all the power, but everyone else in the room is giving that person their energy and life force in order to make something happen. It’s not ever happening from a singular being. I don’t really believe in that. Anyone that has power is given that by a group of people that are working with them. That’s definitely my experience as a choreographer: the only power I have access to is through the generosity of the people I work with. Otherwise, it’s not real, it’s a construction and a patriarchal way of looking at the world.
LS: How did you arrive at Ballez?
KP: Ballez came to be because of a funny conversation I had with a group of other artists and dancers who had similarly rejected ballet and wanted nothing to do with it. Again, ballet seemed to uphold dominant power structures that exemplified this singular creator with a bunch of minions, usually women, who are doing the bidding of that person. It also maintained dominant culture forms of being white, super skinny, and adhering to gender expectations. There were all of these things that were wrong with ballet… But then some of us had just seen another dance performance involving a lot of slow, internal, super performative states… It was an interesting, but we were complaining about it and saying that we missed dancing, saying “We want to dance!” There was a way in which we had each experienced being in ballet class as young children or young adults where we had access to bigger movements: jumping, leaping, turning, flying, through the air. We wanted that again.
This group of mostly queer, female-assigned people — we were joking about how far away ballet felt from us and the word “ballez” came out. I thought, “Oh my god, that is hilarious!” That was the original seed.
Then, as an artist, I just became curious and about using recognizable forms that I can critique through embodying them. I wanted to put my own body into the bodies of the people who I want to work with and who I care about inside of this potentially oppressive form. I wanted to explore how can we reveal the ways in which it is functioning now and consider alternatives. And, I wanted to consider the ways in which we are all complicit in the certain power structures function. [Ballez asks] a lot of questions. And at the end of it all we get to make tremendous performances that I think are transformative because they invite everyone, people from all walks of life, to come into the show and celebrate different bodies and see performances that are about a marginalized community… You walk in and there’s an orchestra, lights, and a kind of grandiosity that’s very celebratory. And the people at the center of it are queer, mostly female-assigned humans. And they just get to be awesome.
LS: What are important things to know about the history of ballet in terms of how it does power and social structures?
KP: Ballet came into popularity in the court of Louis XIV in France. So basically, there’s this king who is the star of all of the shows who makes ballets about himself that glorify himself. He’s the star of all of these performances, and he’s usually a sun god or a king. And the court learned the movement of ballet and would participate in these performances and do these little dances. But it’s a very exclusive group of people. They are the richest group of people at the very top of the heap, and they are isolated from everyone else. But they get to access a kind of alignment in their spines and openness in their chests and soft gentle extension of their hands, feet, and legs… a kind of practiced ease that I think is very powerful. In ballet, it’s a practice that you can learn. But only a certain type of people were allowed to learn.
We’ve continued to have only a certain group of people have access to ballet. It’s still upper middle class families that are able to send their little girls (mostly) to go and learn ballet and have a certain decorum and posture. This is powerful, but girls especially are taught to make themselves look smaller, weaker, and more delicate in the form of ballet. If you’re a young woman learning this form, you’re going to be hoping to play a dead virgin or a dead or dying swan or a spirit that’s a wisp of a spirit that’s just sort of floating through the air. These are the roles you are arcing towards and hoping to get!
Even the sugar plum fairy… I remember Alister MacCauley wrote about the sugar plum fairy in The New York Times once and said the dancer in the role had one sugar plum too many. So ok, the sugar plum fairy has a bit more agency in the Nutcracker. She leads many of the scenes and leads people through the land. But at the same time, she still has to present this kind of delicate softness and can’t be too vigorous in her movements and certainly not too big. Not too big!
One thing I like about ballet — that I want people to have access to — is [the way it creates] a playful space. In the French court, people would flirt with each other or have innuendo with each other through subtle gestures of their feet and hands and just how they hold their heads. That’s fun. It’s connection and playfulness. But again, only this elite group of people would have access to the terminology and clothes that would allow you to participate… Queer people have their own coding and signifiers and obviously there’s a whole culture that we have, too, but again, it’s seen as less than or lower than. So I try to put those two ways of gesturing towards each other and signifying on the same level. I want us to be proud of it and say, we can do it!
LS: More and more educators and facilitators are saying we can’t even think well unless we “get in our bodies” first. What more becomes possible, do you think, when we bring our bodies to our work?
KP: I deeply believe that our bodies are smarter than our brains and that any information that we’re able to process — and what we are able to understand — comes through our bodies experiencing the world. I’m pretty dance centric, too. I was naturally drawn to dancing because it was where I could understand the world as a young person… Dancing was always the place where I could process my experience and find freedom and joy in my body, which also allowed me to do better work. I think it still does. If I need to write, work on something, or communicate about something — if I spend that time to get into my body and I dance, then I can understand things better and communicate better… I’m just a physical thinker, but I don’t know what is going on. There’s a deeper level of functioning that is happening.
I do believe there are really basic things like when you stand in vertical alignment with a free pelvis and have softly extended arms, then you can breathe better and your circulation is better… there’s more oxygen getting to your brain when you’re breathing deeply in these postures. We might not even notice that we’re carrying so much tension when we’re working on something or being with people, but when you enter into dancing, you notice. You notice your body and start to move in a way that feels good. This feels really important to me because it gives us a lot of freedom.
LS: So what is different about Ballez than Ballet?
KP: Ballez is constantly in relationship to ballet. I like using it to uncover how my body and other people’s bodies are being complicit with certain ideas and also disrupting them. Ballez has queer people in it and they just wouldn’t be in a regular ballet company. This has to do with the way they look, the way they present themselves with their genders, and the way they move… The dancers are different, and the stories that get told are different. They center around queer characters and are about experiences that queer people have in the world. These are not that different than the experiences straight people have, but somehow we’re making a big leap by allowing queer people to be the stars of the show.
LS: Are the movements in Ballez different?
KP: The movements are different because they express the unique genders, embodiment, sexuality, and expressivity of the people who are the performers — and those performers — having a history in their bodies of being outside those kind of normative structures — have different ways of moving. But I think that they are super, super beautiful and virtuosic and interesting. The rest of the ballet world is missing out by not including these other [ways of moving]. It’s gotten to be this extremely narrow, rigid place where there’s no room for creativity or self-expression or difference, and I think that’s a bummer.
LS: What are your thoughts on the mainstream ballet world right now? I was just reading about the great majority of ballet companies of course run by men… and the, there’s Misty Copeland. She’s been open about how she chose American Ballet Theater because they didn’t have the same insane body standards as other companies. What’s your take on the current dance scene and the excitement around Misty Copeland?
KP: I think Misty Copeland is incredible and super powerful and important. I also think it’s insane that ABT is framed as a more progressive company in terms of body size because Misty Copeland is tiny. In the realm of humans, she is incredibly small and svelte and narrow in her shape. She’s a beautiful human being, and there are so many other types of bodies and types of humans… maybe 2% of the population is that size. We’re specifically talking about women now. With men in ballet, there’s more tolerance for being a little bit bigger and more muscular.
It’s important that Misty is being a voice of change in that world, and I think that that world is so tragically far behind the rest of society. I hope society is not in alignment with those principles because it’s an extreme situation where most of the choreographers, the commissions, are white men and most of the dancers are very tiny white women… We still have a long way to go.
LS: What do you think happens with more women in more decision-making and leadership roles in the dance world?
KP: I think we will just see different dances, different narratives, and different types of movement. I think we’ll see a deeper investment in connection with dancers in what they are able to bring to the work and are being asked to bring to the work. That’s not to say that all women are going to be the same kinds of choreographers…
I also don’t think we have any idea what we’ll see. There’s just such a crazy lack of stories… I’ve been researching this choreographer Bronislava Nijinska. Very few people recognize her name, but everybody knows her brother Vaslav Nijinsky. He made The Rite of Spring and The Afternoon of a Faun. He was a very famous dancer of the 20s of The Ballet Russes. He made five ballets in his life and they are in almost every ballet company in the world. His sister Nijinska made over 70 ballets and only one or two are actually known and are in existence. She’s literally been stricken from the record and from history.
So I’m working on a project to excavate some of those works, respond to them, and think about her life. But so much has been literally erased. I mean, she taught Balanchine and Maria Tallchief! She was an incredibly influential person in her time… That’s the crazy thing about dance, it’s this ephemeral form, and if no one is performing your dances, then they cease to exist. Her dances were just cut out. I have a lot of opinions about why. She also had slightly queer content in her work. She’s an interesting historical figure.
LS: I appreciate what you said about how dances need to be performed to exist… When someone is doing really new work, I think about how it needs to be picked up and made more visible. Which brings me back to power. When did you know you had power?
KP: I was performing as a child and doing commercials before I became obsessed with ballet. Around age 11, I remember being in this room and feeling aware that my performance in this audition was vulnerable and true. I was able to connect to the people who were there and share a part of myself and create something through my performance. I felt it, and it was so cool. At the same time, I was also aware that they wanted me to be sexy and to present myself in a certain way. They wanted me to wear a fitted bodysuit and push up bra and put on make up. I became very aware that that would be the way I would become a child star. I could see the path ahead of me, and I just said no. It felt good to be able to do that, and my family was supportive of me not continuing on. It was crazy.
I realized then that I have this power, and I can give it to these people and they will use it to sell things if I become this thing for them, which I didn’t want to do. In making my own dances and being able to make decisions about how I use my performance, I can say something else. That’s important to me. So again, I feel like we need a different definition of power. This idea that power is something one person holds over other people is not real. It’s an illusion, and it’s destructive. I think continuing to believe in that and participate in it is not good for humans.
