S2:Ep 9 - Pas de Deux

The patta da is a fundamental part of ballet. It's a duet almost always between a man and a woman. It's something every professional ballet dancer confronts, usually in their adolescence. Like most things in ballet, partnering is harder than it looks. Dancing at pata dua tests the lessons you've learned in the ballet classroom. When she was eighteen, Adrianna Pears got the opportunity to choreograph a patada for the first time.

And I was kind of going through my discovery of my own sexuality at the time. I just had my heart broken for the first time, and so I did this like very sensual, romantic potada. And the guy really is very passionate about this woman that he's dancing with and very excited and wanting to kind of dive in with her. And she's like there, but not fully, and I think there's something holding her back. And she lets him take the lead emotionally, and then they go their

At the School of American Ballet, Adriana had learned the mechanics of partnering, what it felt like to put trust in the boys in her classes to hoist her over their heads in a suspended overhead lift. Now, in making her own patada, she began to understand what that movement conveyed.

So I was using these lifts where she is really not doing anything with a very specific intention, and the way I used it was to show that the woman has no agency, or has less agency, or is making less like dynamic choices about the relationship.

For My Heart podcasts in Rococo Punch, This is the Turning Room of Mirrors America Lands, Part nine, how to dom Adriana remembers when she was a new student at the School of American Ballet and she first learned how to shape her fingers in the Balancine style, a more open, rounded hand with splayed fingers.

And it feels like you're holding air and when you move through space, it breathes with you and it feels like very expansive and empowered. And I remembered just thinking to myself, oh yeah, this is good, Like this makes sense to me in my body.

Adriana says her points us had always felt like a throne to her. She loved the feeling of lifting up onto the tips of her toes, of lengthening, of growing tall, but she had yet to confront the role her gender dictated in this art form.

So I can think back to my first partnering classes at SAB was with Jock Soto, and she's a fabulous teacher. But what I can remember from those early days, first of all, I loved it. I had a great time.

But it's very gendered, first of all, very binary boys and girls. Boys and girls who have already diverged in their training and how they dance. The girls have learned to dance on point, to be graceful, flexible, impossibly elegant. The boys have learned big jumps and tricks, and teachers have warned some of the boys not to be too graceful, too feminine. In partnering class, Adriana says her teacher would turn to the boys and say pick a girl, and the boys would pick their partners grab a girl.

That's like the terminology. So I just would okay, grab me, and then we would learn a combination. And most of it is just the guys having to figure out how to do it and build the strength, because you were talking like teenage boys who are not developed fully either. But it's like they get the opportunity to learn and to try and to fail and to grow and to build. And my job as a woman was to be grabbed and held and let them figure it out. And I

She also absorbed how they ended each partnering class. Boys had to do pushups, girls drilled ashia pes, these steps where you ra but lea slide your feet in and out and roll up on the point. That stuck with her.

The emphasis for the women was their technique and their lines and their aesthetic, and for the men it was their strength and their core, and I definitely started thinking about that a lot.

A few years later, she got the chance to choreograph her first Potida, part of a student choreographic workshop at SAP. It was about two people in a relationship. The guy is all in, but the woman is less sure. She lets him pursue her, then she seems to pull away. She slides along when he lifts her high above his head.

I think I was discovering what love was and what sexuality was in my own life, and I knew that I wanted to elicit some sort of like deep emotional response from the audience.

In partnering class, Adriana had learned how to do these suspended overhead lifts where the man lifts the woman up high into the air. She used lifts like that her piece in a purposeful way to show the woman is passive, uncommitted to the relationship, complacent enough to let the man lead. What audience members responded to was the sensuality of the piece. Women, especially older women, approached her after your piece.

I loved your piece. I really responded to that, and I thought to myself, WHOA okay? Well, and then I wow, yeah, I think I want to be a professional choreographer.

In choreographing, Adriana found a new kind of freedom, an answer to the lack of control she sometimes felt in the ballet classroom. In the classroom, she'd been conditioned to stay silent, to obey the teacher. She made sure to fit the mold of the ballerina, pretty thin, feminine. But Adriana still needed to figure out how she fit. For one thing, the majority of professional choreographers are men. And then there was the fact that she still hid a big part of herself.

I remember walking in the halls of sab and thinking, like, am I the only one like me who's ever walked these halls. I had never heard of anyone any queer women before, never at that time, No. Never.

She was out to her high school friends and a few ballet friends, but mostly in ballet, She says she felt like she stuck out, as if she were carrying around a backpack all the time, an awkward accessory that everyone could see, but the secret of who she really was was tucked inside.

I didn't have fully have language for myself, even about who I was, but I knew that people were already kind of like is she but like not really knowing. So when I got into the company at City Ballet, I was deathly afraid of making the other women uncomfortable. That was like my overwhelming experience. I was terrified, constant anxiety.

By the time she was an apprentice, she was in a tenuous position. She had not yet secured an official spot in the company.

In ballet companies, there's a lot of couples At the time. I remember thinking to myself, I should get a boyfriend in the company to secure my job. And I remember having conversations with my friend of mine, who was also an apprentice gay man, and we were saying, like that might help us, because it's so messed up that I thought that that would actually give me some job security.

It was before one performance that it all came to

Like what kind of guys do you like? And the whole room stopped talking and like looked to see what I was gonna say. She was like no, no, really, like what's your like man flavor? And I was like, I, well, ah, I'm gay, and she goes, no, you're not, and I

Like so many dancers, she didn't get a job after her apprenticeship, so she went to another prestigious ballet company, another company centered on Balancine's choreography, Miami City Ballet. She stayed there seven years. She also Korea when she could. While there, she made a piece called Cafe Music. She took that first pott of dough she'd made at SAB and added two more movements, and this time she approached it differently.

I took special care to pass who's leading and who's following back and forth, and that's just what it was, just what was coming out of me naturally.

But it wasn't natural for these professional ballet dancers to dance this way.

My friend Andre, who was the dancer, was having a hard time, like letting his partner, you know, hold him or pull him. And I remember the dancers asking me what is this about? And I said, it's about finding yourself. It's about finding who you are within your friendships, within your partnerships. When you're out at a club, when you're out at a bar, who are you and how do you relate to the people around you.

As Adriana played with the push and of these new ways of partnering and who was taking the lead, she also rehearsed her original padata with that overhead lift, she began to realize how little choreographers consider the meaning of this movement. For her, in mena surrender of agency, but in practically all other examples she'd previously seen or danced, it felt like a showpiece, a feed of strength that hammered home an idea about the roles of men and women in dance.

What I realized about suspend it overhead lifts is that they are very gendered because Traditionally, what we're used to seeing is a man lifting a woman, and you, whether it's conscious or not, understand that it can't be the other way around, because it's just not what we're used to seeing, and it's also not the way that women are trained or socialized.

After that realization, Adriana choreographed many more ballet pieces, but she never used another over lift. She didn't put them in any of her dances, not a single one.

And when I do use a lift, we move through it. I kind of fold it into like the fabric of the movement, so there's never like a point where we're sitting there and being like that man is lifting that woman. Wow.

At Miami City Ballet, Adriana continued to choreograph pieces. As she watched the partnering works being created and performed around her, she was struck with a familiar feeling, we.

Are just fully accepting the fact that we are always seeing partnerships where the women have less agency, over and over and over and over again.

In twenty fourteen, Adriana was he'd an invitation to choreograph a piece for New York City Ballet Dancers, her old workplace, where the director Peter Martin's had not offered her a contract to join the company after her apprenticeship. Now the company was going to perform her work.

It was the first time I'm back in those studios for someone back in Lincoln Center, since I had not gotten my job and Peter Martin's didn't hire me.

When she returned to New York, Peter Martins was still the director of the company, decades after he'd been chosen to be Balancine's successor.

And we went out to dinner right that took us out to dinner, and they made sure to tell me that I was going to be sitting next to Peter because he knew me, so that would make him feel comfortable, and that I was responsible somehow for that.

Adriana says throughout the dinner, Peter was chumming with her, periodically touching her leg or her arm. Again, she felt like she was playing a role that did not fit.

But like, is that just Peter's behavior. I don't think so. I think there's this like system, it's passed down. It has to be. I wasn't there. I didn't know, mister b I know the stories, I don't know what's true. I don't know what's not.

Adriana grew up hearing stories and anecdotes passed down through generations of women who had danced for balancing. At the time, they felt useful, like don't think, just do it, offered a way to get out of her head when she danced, but there was one quote that always felt off.

Ballet is woman, okay, but woman is what woman is straight, woman is thin, woman has makeup on, Woman makes her male director feel confident. If we're using like partnering as kind of a metaphor, I think it's like what the woman's role is, Like the men are in charge, the men make the choices, and we are We're gonna hold ourselves and put our foot out and point it and be the person who's following, not the person who's leading. I think it's like the same on stage and off.

The choices made about the choreography or staging in ballets can perpetuate that. There's a moment. In Peter Martin's rendition of Romeo and Juliet, at one point, the audience hears a loud slap, the sound of Juliette's father hitting Juliet and knocking her down, a detail that was never part of Shakespeare's play. The company also performed a work called Odessa. It was by a Russian choreographer, Alexey Radmonsky, and in

That was really hard. I can't accept that. I'm like not okay with that, and I'm absolutely not okay with moving forward with his art form just not having not be a consideration, especially with newarks being quarreographed.

Adriana lives in an upper Manhattan studio apartment. She wears a backwards baseball cap. When she opens the door, her big smile almost gleams through miss Small boxes still wait to be unpacked after a recent move. She rolls her neck, rubbing an injury that had her paralyzed in bed for a day. The shower stops running, and Adriana's girlfriend emerges from the bathroom, Ala odey. ALA's long brown hair is wavy and damp. She limps over her broken foot, still healing.

It is probably one of the most like freeing feelings to dance on stage. But obviously, just like ballet as an art form, there's a heavy influence of sexism racism.

This is ala Odey, Adriana's girlfriend. AILA's currently a soloist at Carolina Ballet. The two of them see a lot of overlap in their experiences.

Just like the world we live in, there are a lot of systemic issues that put people into a lot of boxes.

Yeah, did you ever worry that, like you would look to butch on stage?

I mean constantly all the time, because I'm very like physically, I'm athletic. I'm not like your a little wafy ballerina, And so then it's like that's perceived to be more masculine and athletic because athleticism is stereotyped with masculinity, and therefore any movement I do is going to be perceived

You know? Is that an issue? When I first came to Mimas Ballet, there was a one of the principal dancers said, oh, is age on a lesbian because she looks like one? Yeah, And I from like the moment I started working there, I was like so terrified that I was like, yeah, that the way that I dance somehow is like giving me away, and that people in the audience would be like that one dyke, you know, Like.

I don't know, but it was very scary. No, it is really scary, and like especially too. I mean, more of my fear was when I was closeted still in like people would point blank be like, oh, are you Leslian And then I'd be like, no, I'm not, and They're like, are you sure. I didn't even think it was possible to be a queer female identifying ballet answer.

That was until three years ago, in twenty twenty, he lives at Carolina Ballet. She's sitting in a choreography workshop.

I'm like sitting on the floor. You know.

I was fresh in the company and in walks this blonde, tall, beautiful woman in a blue stripe button down, and I'm like, what is that?

That is not a straight woman.

It was Adriana walking in to help run the workshop.

And I kept asking around, being like she gay? Is she gay? Like I was asking it all of my friends and stuff, and they're like.

I don't know, Like I don't know her, you know whatever. And so, actually, Adriana was the voice female queer ballet dancer I ever met. You're one of the first people I like really came out to because you walked in and I was like, oh my god, I'm not alone. And so then I damned you because you made a

It's not part of our world. It's not part of the conversations that like we're allowed to have through ballet. Right, So even though there have been queer women throughout history. We don't know who they are in the same way that I know like every single one of Valancine's sexual partners. You know what I'm saying. It's like, no, that's so true.

It felt impossible because I had just simply never seen it.

Periodically, Adriana gets a text from another queer dancer to check out an Instagram post, almost like a treasure hunt for the stories of queer ballet dancers who came before her instag was on Instagram.

Yeah, I did.

Adriana scrolls through her Instagram feed looking for something.

This is how this is like, I don't even know, I have to look it up. This is what I'm saying. So I actually don't know how to pronounce that lie I see. I don't even know how to pronounce it. But miss Fuller became an overnight sensation when she danced her patented Serpentine dance at Fulle Brgier in Paris in eighteen ninety two. Fuller even managed to be openly lesbian while evoking virtually no titilation or disapproval in her public Interesting.

It's also hard to find any bit of queerness inside any of the big story ballets. The classics ballet is known for.

The gayest role in the ballet canon is Murta.

Mirta is a ghost queen in the classical ballet. Giselle is ballet cannon choreographed by two men in eighteen forty one, beloved by audiences coveted by dancers. Basically, the plot goes like this, A beautiful young peasant girl and a disguised nobleman fall in love.

She falls in love with this guy who comes into town who is lying to her about who he is because really he's royalty, but puts on peasants' clothes to get this girl because she's pretty, falls in love. Turns out he's actually a prince and is already betrothed to someone else, so he can't be with her anyway. She's very upset about that. Also, she has a weak heart,

She collapses to the ground and she dies in some combination of over exertion and a broken heart, and then her spirit goes to the land of the Willies. The Willies are like a sisterhood of ghosts in the woods. Ghosts of unmarried women who died after being betrayed by men.

They're all scorn. There's scorn women who jilted virgins who never made it, died before they got married.

Yeah, and they've been hurt by their their men.

And the queen of these jilted versions is Mirta. She's a jiltedest of the mall.

Mirta is a force in this ballet, a terrifying figure, bitter and cool role conceived by the men who created the ballet almost two hundred years ago, and one of the most heteronormative ballets in existence.

And she is a man hater.

And so if you are a man and you enter the Land of the Willies during the nighttime, you are sentenced to dance to death. So Mirta dances all of them to death.

After Giselle dies, the man who betrayed her, Albricht, goes to her grave to mourn. He asks forgiveness of her ghost, and he follows that ghost to the Land of the Willies. He meets Mirta, who sentences Albricht to dance to death, but then Giselle steps in. She helps Albricht by dancing with him until morning, when the willies no longer have power. The strength of her love saves Albricht, Giselle returns to her grave, and Albricht lives. I always feel conflicted in

Weeks and the goal for that residency was to work on partnering with two dancers in points choos.

She wondered what a patada would look like entirely on point, How would it even work?

What is possible and what isn't. I thought I would just kind of play around and see what came.

But she found herself creating an actual piece instead, a new dance a potada. This patado, though, would be between two women, two queer women, something she'd never seen on a ballet stage before.

I think a lot of queer stories are centered around pain and trauma. Pain and trauma are definitely things that queer people experience every day all over the world. But it's been important to me to create peer stories that come from a place of joy and love and respect. Specifically, this was one that I wanted to feel respectful, overwhelmingly respectful. And it's not one person manipulating the other, it's two

Up a potative? She came up with these five pillars of partnering.

First thing lifts, All types of lifts will go in that category. Then there's counterbalance, like counterweight, so you're pulling off each other, so there's an amount of tension between the two dancers. There's promenades, things that were one person is on balance and rotating.

Like one person is posed on point. Historically, the woman she puts her hand on the man's arm and he moves her around in a circle so that she twirls slowly in place like the tiny ballery now you see inside music boxes.

And then there's turns pure witz so like spinning. And then the last pillar is what their connection is and what story they're telling and how they tell it. You think, you take that, you keep the hand.

She wanted to work through these pillars in the studio one by one and find her own verse.

That's it. There, You go prom and I love it and one, two, three, four, five, six. I don't want to just stick two dancers on point together and fit them inside the traditional rubric, a traditional blueprint of what we understand partner to be. It needs to be our own, it needs to be authentic. And here there we go. Yeah, and as wide a lunge as possible.

Here here is the piece became her answers to those five pillars.

In this space, with these two dancers telling this story, a story of respectful queer affection. What's my answer to the idea of a traditional lift, what's my answer to these like to a partner turn? So you're stirring, stay connected? Yeah, we do it one time. But the other thing that I had to super dive into was point shoes and how that affects the physicality of partnerships. The person who has the flat shoe inherently and definitely has more agency

Another thing they had to confront was trust. They had to learn a new kind of trust.

Sierra, let her really carry you, she's got you and reach so you go into an attitude when I was talking about my partnering classes, where it was this trust that like the guy's gonna grab me and he has to figure out and you know what if he drops me, he has to figure it out. But when it's a woman like there's we had to really deal with the fact that we didn't have that trust in each other. I do not trust that a woman's gonna get me. I think I'm too heavy. I think she's gonna drop me.

She remembers. On date, she put the dancers in different positions and said, close your eyes, feel each other's weight. Move What does it feel like when you take the other person's weight. Each day, Adriana and the dancers Remy and si Her showed up and together they discover what worked and problem solved along the way, adding new sections to the piece. The beginning of the ballet was what they created last.

I had them come out onto the stage and just stand there. I wanted it to kind of be like, yeah, you're going to see a gay potota, now you ready, And then they start moving. I kept thinking about this idea of carving space for each other.

The two of them don't touch, they don't even make eye contact, Neither of them grabs the other, but they start to move around each other. Their arms flow and softly slice around the other's silhouette, like they're feeling what it is.

To be close, carving space around each other.

Making space for each other, then moving within.

That space, tracing each other's bodies but not touching each other. There's a respect in that, and the first time they really like look at each other. I wanted there to be like an establishing moment of I don't know, acknowledgment. I didn't want it to look like choreography that we've seen before with men and women. So what are different

Watching it, I got shivers and then I started to well up. Just seeing two women on stage being centered in a way that has nothing to do with how men see them felt new. I realized I hadn't seen it before, not quite like this, not while they're in point shoes.

We don't see women being tender with each other in ballet. We don't get to see intimate relationships between two women, tender and affectionate and loving. They dance separately from each other, trying to figure out what it is they're each saying.

One of them dips the other back, like that classic tango move, what you've seen a man do to a woman a hundred times.

She dips her, she immediately comes up onto point on point together, but you can see how they're just constantly passing back and forth. Who's leading, who's following, who's on point, who's not, who's in charge? And then I wanted them to end in some sort of partnered image. There's this

The music fades until it's gone. They still move in the silence, slowing.

And then it kind of fizzles into this like last moment of carving space together.

When I watch the piece, it's like I feel Ballet is a woman in a new way, in a way that empowers in a way I don't think I've ever seen before.

And now there's like a whole new of young people who are just like out Jill, feeling great and I love that. But Ballet hasn't changed. So like that's why it's like, we need to be making more diverse works.

You know, next time on the Turning, when you finally do move on, there's a recovery period, and I think the recovery period takes about ten years on average to function in.

The quote unquote real world. The Turning is a production of Rococo Punch and iHeart Podcasts. It's written and produced by Alan Lance Lesser and me. Our story editor is Emily Foreman. Mixing and sound designed by James Trout. Jessica Crisa is our assistant producer. Andrea Assuage is our digital producer. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. You can learn about Adriana's continued work to showcase LGBTQ plus artists and stories