the brief history of a trans ballet dancer

in three queer movements

I spot myself in the mirror as I turn my unbalanced pirouettes and I see you. You, legendary, queer ancestor. The plié. The tendue. The fondue. The glissade. The assemblé.

This is how I become you.

The First Movement

There is a dissonance that I feel between my desire to attend weekly ballet class and my values, both the ones that I hold in a spiritual and emotional ideal, but also the ones that I hold in my literal scoliotic, trans, autistic body. To begin, my existence on this planet living within capitalism-hell is categorically against my values: by existing I will inevitably cause harm simply by turning on the light switch. Therefore, I must find a different framework by which to judge my actions and make my choices. So putting values aside, I am a dancer and I want to dance by taking class. Immediately we come directly back to a question of value, like the moth to the light, I cannot stay away. Of all the dance styles that I could choose, why do I choose ballet, the one that is arguably upholding the most oppressive values? While modern dance is a Western form, at least modern was created in response to ballet, to question, to poke, to defy what could be defined as dance. I love modern dance! Why couldn’t I just continue on being a modern dancer questioning, questioning, questioning? Why did I have to go back to ballet? Stay in the questions, Elise. Stay. In. The. Questions.

Okay, so why must I embody the cruelest form?

Dig deeper, Elise, where did it begin? Think. Think. Think…

A few weeks ago, a friend is telling me that when she was a child she saw Rudolf Nureyev perform. Rudolf Nureyev. And everything, everything floods floods floods rushes swoosh back towards me. I had forgotten. I had forgotten, you, my beautiful man in tights. How could I have forgotten you? 

Dancer. I found the book on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. Red. The title simply, Dancer. I am dancer, this book is for me, said my brain. Dancer dancer dancer. I can’t remember what year it was, I was somewhat of a 16 year old. I devoured the book. Ate it right up, a pint of blueberries.

The book was a work of fiction about the life of Rudolf Nureyev, a Soviet-born ballet dancer who danced between the years of 1958-1992.¹ I don't remember the details of this book, but I remember the visuals, the extravagant life of a gay ballet dancer in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. I remember the descriptions of Nureyev dancing, Paris, parties, glamour, bathhouses, fucking, fighting, AIDS, fame, flamboyance. Such fictional allure.

I don’t know if this book is actually any good or not but what I am here to say is that I fell madly in love with this fictional Rudolf Nureyev, which began my descent into ballet obsession. And, as Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union, I, who had spent the majority of my life up until that point as a competitive Irish dancer, wanted to defect from the world of Irish dance into the exquisite universe of ballet.

It’s hard to piece the story together. I was fed up with the wigs and tanned legs and heavy dresses laden with jewels that Irish dance required. I wanted ballet, very badly. My longing stretched to the other side of the oppressive dance world. And as desire is wont to do, I cannot place it. I don’t quite know what I wanted from ballet. Good god, why ballet? Are tutus and tights any better than wigs and jewels? Upon years and years of internal reflection, I see at least two facets to this desire:

1. I wanted to be a ballet dancer for beauty. Ballet is beautiful, which begs the question: is it beautiful because it appeals to some idealistic standard we have named as beautiful (i.e., whiteness), or is it beautiful because beauty is beauty? As a teen I wished that I had the grace and finesse and flexibility and litheness that ballet dancers have, that Irish dancers don’t always possess. I wanted to lift my leg behind me, raise my port aux bras, and pose in stillness. 

2. I had crushes on male ballet dancers, most of them being gay men. And this is where it gets tricky. Knowing now that I am just a little trans kid, we can ask the age old question: did I want to be those gay male ballet dancers or did I want to be in those gay male ballet dancers? I think it is a complex combination of les deux, but a big piece of what I couldn't see as a teenager, perhaps part of why I was drawn to male ballet dancers specifically is not only their striking display of effeminate masculinity, it is also the way they partner their women. Ultimately to be a male ballet dancer is to prop-up the woman and be closer to her: a desire I possessed but could not name. 

You see? It’s not all black and white over here. It’s not all male and female, man and woman, masculine and feminine. It’s a little bit more trans and a little bit more non-binary, two concepts that allegedly do not exist in the oppressive gendered form of ballet, lest we get curious and question the players on the stage. 

Let's now call in the help of some brilliant scholars to enhance our witnessing and questioning: 

Ballet is a quintessential art form that upholds patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity. The man partners the woman; they both are trained in different techniques and movements; they wear different outfits; they exhibit different qualities that we may expect a man or a woman to exhibit. There is little room for error or transgression or trans people for that matter (but! see the Travesty dancer further below). Susan Leigh Foster has a performance piece called The Ballerina’s Phallic Pointe where she points to the obvious objectification of the ballerina by arguing that the ballerina, herself, is an extension of the phallus: “quivering with responsiveness, ready to be guided anywhere, she inclines toward him, leaving one leg behind, ever erect, a strong reminder of her desire. As he promenades around the single pointe on which she balances, the leg lifts higher and higher…a full 180 degrees vertical, looms behind them, white-pink, utterly smooth, charged with a straining, vibrant vitality."² Having read and watched this piece, Foster's framing and examples of patriarchy within ballet are incredibly vivid and hard to ignore. I mean…Foster kind of…nailed it.

Furthermore, to exhibit how ballet upholds white supremacy, we can turn to Margo Jefferson in her memoirs that explore growing up as an affluent black woman. She writes about her late sister, “Denise was a dancer, and every week those forceful limbs of hers were being refined by ballet aesthetics. Forceful, muscled brown limbs being refined by ballet.”³ Jefferson wittily calls our attention to what is hidden behind the whiteness of it all, “Oh the expedient innocence of whiteness! It can call one thing—exclusion—by so many other names,” and furthermore, Jefferson, like me, as a young girl, comes to a certain type of adoration toward ballet, “I worshiped their access to the exquisite and I worshiped how they labored for it. I want to emphasize how resolutely ballerinas worked to build and protect this fortress of exquisiteness.”⁴ Jefferson is not only naming how she and her sister were drawn to the “exquisite fortress” of balletic whiteness as young black girls, but also that ballet is an unnatural creation. It is not just that some people are gifted and some aren’t. It is oppressive work to contort your body, your beliefs, your life into a ballet body. That is, a body who is white, cis, straight, and thin. It is oppressive work to uphold any standard of patriarchy and whiteness no matter who you are.

Which brings me to the present day in which, given this knowledge and way of viewing ballet that I wholeheartedly agree with, I ask myself the question: why have I, this purported radical, queer, trans person who has hated the patriarchy from a young age and is committed to interrogating whiteness, especially their own, dedicated, twice a week even, to spending their own money, time, and energy on attending ballet class, honing their body into a form, being asked to hold their turn out, lengthen their neck, find grace in their carriage, and keep their ever rolling hips still? Why do I decide to go and give my body and ask the master to oppress, oppress me more, tell me I am wrong, shape me into an “exquisite,” stiff muscle and stretch that long, long line such that my transness, my queerness, my curved spine perish and I am what you want me to be: beautiful by your elegant, fucked up standard?

How did we get here? To present day Elise as a dedicated practitioner of ballet? Well, teenage Elise, full of their raw desire after their fictional encounter with Nureyev, did the best they could and attempted to become a ballet dancer at the ripe age of 16 (which is, by the standard, late). I had been a ballet dancer at age 4 and got so jealous of my siblings who were doing Irish dance that I quickly quit ballet and joined the jig. If only I hadn't quit, but alas. Throughout my childhood I had Irish dance class on Wednesdays and Tuesdays on the third floor of the Cultural Arts Center downtown, which was the same floor where the City Ballet had their studios. Synchronously, there was an adult ballet class on Thursdays at the City Ballet. It was perfect; my Irish dance teacher would never know.⁵ 

With all the strings of queerness intertwined, in Nureyev, a flamboyant gay dancer in tights, I saw myself, an aspiring flamboyant gay dancer in tights. The former is and the latter becomes. The former as cis. The latter as trans.

The Second Movement

The Thursday class was taught by a 93-year-old woman named Elissa. She was small and frail and taught with her eyes closed. Every week I would show up to class and each time she would ask me my name. “Elise,” I would say. “Ohh, that was my name before I changed it for the stage! I will never forget your name.” And each week, she forgot, telling me the same refrain.

But what I never forgot was the boy in my class who jumped really high, my supposed crush on him, watching him perform in his tights. That strange feeling. Vicariousness. I Want. That. 

My time studying ballet with Elissa didn’t last all that long: I moved out of my hometown and started to take dance classes at my college, dedicating myself to learning any new type of dance I could. I wanted to leave Irish dance behind and be a normal dancer. I wanted to dance with the ballet girls. I wanted to dance like the ballet boys. I wanted to belong.

In college I learned to love modern dance and adopted it as my primary form. I continued to take ballet on the side as a form of medicine to enhance my other artistic practices, but I never felt good in those ballet classes. The teachers didn’t make me feel good, the other students didn’t make me feel good (we now know that I am in charge of my own feelings, so we can reframe that as: I just didn’t feel myself in those classes). 

It became clear to me that I didn’t belong in ballet. Ballet was so codified. There wasn’t room for error; I had to hold myself in a certain way and every time I jumped, my body barely left the ground, unlike when I jumped around as an Irish dancer. But I continued to try. I donned the leotard and tights for a while. I didn’t mind, actually, I was into it. Until it began to hurt. The dysphoria became louder and louder, still without language. My gracefulness slipped out from under my ballet slippers and I bounced around the studio like a potato, uncoordinated and heavy. My body didn't fit the form, but I didn't really understand why. I would watch the ballet girls execute all the steps with grace. Their bodies understood the form like nature, not oppression. Why didn't it work for me? Was I not a dancer? Was I not a girl?  

After college while I lived in different places, ballet was something I did rarely and grieved often. Grieved as a reckoning with my body. Grieved as a reckoning with desire. Grieved as a reckoning with identity. Grieved because I would never be a ballet girl, nor would I be a ballet boy and if I could not be in either of those positions, I could not be a ballet dancer. 

So I stopped dancing. 

And Nureyev, yeah, you kept soaring, deep, deep inside me. jumpingfaggotfloatingsexspinningflamboyanceflyingfabulousglamourloveAIDSdeath. 

The life of my beautiful man in tights.

I entered a new era of my life: I was out as queer and trans and being a performer was no longer a primary goal of mine, given both my mental space and living in the wake of Covid-19. But when going out in public became possible again after Covid-19, I found myself eager to enjoy communal space and I remembered dance class as an environment for enjoyment. I tried as many modern classes as I could find because that was what I knew and liked. This was supposed to be fun. But it wasn't fun. I could not find a class that did not bore me or make me sick. 

And I don't know why, I don't remember, but one day, fed up with modern, I walked into a ballet class and for the first time in my life, that ballet class made me feel that I was worthy of ballet. Not that the form fit my body, not that my dancing was particularly beautiful, but that I had a right to be in that room. I had a right to labor towards the “exquisite.” 

Dancing in this ballet class taught by a cis gay man made me feel more seen than I ever have in my twenty something years of dance classes.⁶ I felt mirrored: as an out queer person taught by another out queer person, we immediately fell into a relationship of shared knowledge in knowing the oppressor. We can both recognize that it is hard to show up in this ballet space because this space and it’s fucked up standards are not made for us on principal. And with that, these standards shouldn’t be for anyone, but by our mere identities not being within the expected norm, we have to labor more to show up to the ballet space, which is already one of such challenging, painful toil. And C, my teacher, welcomed me with such candid, charming, intelligent sass that I never looked back. 

The Third Movement

When I dance ballet, I inherently queer the form. It took me a long time to get here. All that grief that I was never going to be a ballet girl nor a ballet boy. My body pirouetting is taking ballet and frankly, making it ugly, and then making it beautiful by my own standards. In addition to my queerness, I also have scoliosis and thus, there are certain positions in ballet that I just cannot physically do because of the degree of my curvature. It is incredibly difficult for me to keep my hips aligned, because my natural bone structure is not aligned! Again, we can wonder, why the hell do you do ballet, Elise, if you can't even do it? At this point in the essay, I am exhausted. But my body likes the challenge of striving for an impossible position or movement. It feels fun to do a thing that is hard and figure out how to embody it within my corporeal existence.

I knew before I wrote this essay that doing a thing simply because one enjoys it is a perfectly valid reason to do a thing, thus perhaps this whole essay is without point. I dance ballet because I enjoy it. I feel understood by my teacher both in my queer identity and also within the dichotomy that to be a student of ballet is to both uphold the art form and break down the standard of oppression. I have found a space that welcomes me in and then allows me to, in turn, question it. I don’t enjoy all ballet classes, but I enjoy C's class because he teaches with a candor and attention I don’t find in many other teachers. C pays attention to the environment in which ballet dancers are developing, and he pays attention to how to educate adults who will not become professional ballet dancers, but are still dedicated to adopting the craft onto the body they already have. And the best part is the dreaming, the imagination. All of us in that room, C included, are in that room because there is some long, lost dream within us, and we, unlike many adults, are dedicated to our longing.

Dancing ballet is inherent to my queerness. Ballet is, in one sense, how I understand my queerness. Ballet was a significant genesis of my trans identity within my pubescent body before I could name my transness. I needed Nureyev and his story more than I could ever know back then. My queerness and ballet are so intertwined that coming back to ballet as an out trans adult is a gift to my teenage self, fulfilling a multi-layered desire of identity and being that I did not have the awareness to understand at the time. It is a return to my teenage self, affirming 16 year old me that if I want to be a gay boy in ballet tights I can…I just might look like a trans person in basketball shorts turning unstable pirouettes. But for me, that’s good enough.

While I do feel safe in C's ballet class due to our relationship, sometimes I am left wondering why I am often the only masc presenting person in a room full of femmes wearing tights and leotards? The question again, perhaps has an easy answer, in that, trans people are and were traumatized in the ballet space and thus, don’t frequent ballet class. Duh! I did that for years. The gender trauma. Why would trans people engage with an art form that is not safe for them?

There is a ballet company called Ballez based in New York City, which was started by Katy Pyle, a queer ballet dancer who had been "othered" by their ballet education. Ballez employs trans and non-binary dancers and explores specifically how to break down the barriers of ballet to be more accessible to all bodies. They recently closed their performance of Travesty Doll Play, an exploration of gender and ballet within the Travesty framework.⁷ The Travesty period in nineteenth century ballet was a magical time when female ballet dancers took on many of the male roles in both the corps and as romantic leads, which is just thrilling proof that ballet can go beyond the gender binary (Susan Leigh Foster also explores the Travesty dancer in her lecture)! 

I recently took a class with Ballez, which was a different experience than taking a regular ballet class. The barres were placed in a circle, we danced to pop music, and we were encouraged to make eye contact while dancing. It should be noted that while I had a fun time, even felt liberated, I also had an initial reaction to the Ballez class where I found myself thinking, “Um, excuse me, this is not ballet. I came for ballet.” Wherein, a ballet class has a certain ubiquitous rigor and structure of working the entire system of the body that can be expected pretty much across the board for drop-in ballet class. And this, this queer ballet, was not that. 

And here, I have caught myself desiring oppression.

And so, I invite myself to reckon. 

This is an example of how white supremacy and patriarchy live in my body as a human and a dancer. I am still sifting through the shame, the reluctance, and the contention I felt by walking into a ballet class that was not what I wanted it to be, but was fully queered, made by and for people like me. Shouldn't it have been euphoric? This is what I have been longing for, right? 

Sigh. Dancing ballet in the traditional sense with it’s beautiful, corrupt standard is what I like, is where I get to feel like the flamboyant twink that I am. What do I do when I find my gender euphoria by existing within an oppressive art form? What is this telling me about how my body craves laboring towards the “exquisite,” craves doing something impossible? Am I to stop doing it to stop enforcing oppressive systems? Or am I to go towards it to seek my own internal beauty, liberation, euphoria? Can I ask myself to live in the knowledge that a plié is simply a gesture between a performer and an audience member, and can I do that gesture in basketball shorts or a tutu, and have it mean…nothing?

I spot myself in the mirror as I turn my unbalanced pirouettes and I see you. You, legendary, queer ancestor. The plié. The tendue. The fondue. The glissade. The assemblé.

This is how I become you.

To be a non-binary ballet dancer, which is who I am, is to be in these questions, to hold these juxtaposing desires. This is how I make ballet a safe space for myself, and for others, by demanding it live outside of it’s own binary and engaging with all parts of the art form. Ballet is neither male nor female. It is neither black nor white. It is neither oppressive nor benign. It is neither cruel nor beautiful. It is both, and.

And so am I.

1. Rudolf Nureyev, wikipedia.

2. Foster, Susan Leigh, editor. Corporealities. 1996. pg. 1. See also, The Ballerinas Phallic Pointe.

3. Jefferson, Margo. Constructing a Nervous System. 2022. pg. 116.

4. see above, 116.

5. It should be here noted that within my Irish dance school we had a bit of an internal rivalry with the ballerinas (I have no idea how they felt about us, but probably pretty annoyed since we would bang around with our hard shoes and play incredibly loud Irish music into the night). Ballet is much more popular and thus gets lauded often for how athletic and difficult it is as a dance form. We, as Irish dancers, felt that we were not considered enough as athletes in the public eye in the same way as ballerinas, and we just wanted some credit for our hard work. :) As someone who has engaged with both dance forms, I can attest both forms are incredibly challenging.

6. This is not to say I have not had other queer dance teachers in my life. In fact, I had a few prominent, wonderful ones in college, but the combination of not being out in college and the festering wound of attending a college where everyone is literally fighting to feel seen by their "beloved" theater community, made it difficult to truly feel understood by those educators. And they really were/are wonderful. Thank you, to all my teachers. 

7. Ballez. You can watch the documentary here.