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Meet Ballez

By Fabio Crispim

Meet Ballez, a group working on celebrating gay and trans narratives through ballet.

The group is made up of artists, musicians and performers.

Talking to The Huffington Post, found Katy Pyle says: “Ballez re-writes classics from the ballet canon to celebrate the stories and performances of queer people, and reimagines the classically gendered characters of those stories in our own image.”

“We diverge from the classical ballet gender binary and present, instead, multiplicity, complexity, and alternatives to the classical norms. The characters in our shows play with, and break, the classical rules in terms of how they dress, present, dance and behave in relationship to one another.”

Ballex started a kickstarted campaign to help them fund a production of Sleeping Beauty & The Beast. The production will be a reimagining of the two classics and has been rewritten to involve the history of lesbian and gay activists.

“I want our audiences to leave the theatre with a radically shifted sense of what a ballet is, what if should be and who it can represent.”

You can catch the full Huffington Post interview here.