NEW YORK (1010 WINS/WCBS 880) — Adriana Pierce is a dancer, choreographer, director, and artist based in New York City who founded Queer the Ballet during the pandemic to create and foster the queer community and queer representation in the world of professional ballet.
"When I was in professional ballet, I was always the only queer woman in all of those spaces and I found that to be incredibly isolating and I did not handle it very well," Pierce said.
As a young queer ballerina, Pierce felt there was no space for her and had to keep part of her identity away from her life in the dance studio everyday. While quarantining in her NYC apartment during the pandemic in 2020, she began to miss dance and for the first time, began connecting with other queer women and non binary dancers.
"It ended up being like 15 to 20 dancers on an initial zoom call ... we started talking to each other and we realized that a shared experience that we all had was the lack of shared experience in terms of being a queer person who's not a man, a queer man, in professional ballet spaces," Pierce said.
"It felt so empowering, in a deeply profound way to feel seen like that, but also using ballet and our craft like as our connecting thread," she added.
Queer the Ballet was eventually born after some of the dancers that she connected with through those calls asked if she would make a piece as part of a duet for them. Pierce realized that she wanted use that to start a larger conversation to foster the feeling of community and allow for dancers to feel seen for the first time.
Despite ballet's Eurocentric roots, Pierce believes it can be more inclusive without major alterations. The core technique, after all, isn't inherently gendered. This opens the door to authentic storytelling and partnerships expressed through movement that resonates with the identities of the dancers themselves.
"It's very important to me that when two people are dancing together that they have equal agency. There's a mutual respect that each of those dancers are taking as much the same amount of space within that partnership, both like literally and also figuratively," Pierce said.
Pierce actively seeks out works by queer composers, particularly women, for her performances. This meticulous research stems from her understanding of music's power to shape emotional resonance. However, the scarcity of such compositions adds another layer of challenge to her artistic process.
"When you look back at the life of Ethel Smyth, for instance, who is a lesbian, British composer, you see that she used to publish work with just the first letter of her name and then her last name so people didn't know that she was a woman," Pierce said. "But then when the piece with premiere and she would walk out to take her bow in front of the orchestra it'd be a full on like psych - it's me, I'm a woman."
Pierce's latest piece titled, "Dream of a Common Language" was inspired by lesbian writer and activist Adrienne Rich’s 1978 poetry collection and will premiere later this month.
"We have this big piece coming up called 'Dream of a Common Language' where all of the work, all of the music that we're using are by queer women," Pierce said. "It's inspired by Adrian Rich's poetry and she has a lot of beautiful imagery and emotionality to pull from."
One poem in particular, about an all women mountain climbing team whom died in a storm in 1974 is based on a real life incident where Pierce not only aims to showcase vulnerability, but also connect the audience to the story through dance. "I think that this idea of these very high stakes of the thing that you love the most being the thing that has the potential to hurt you the most is how we're beginning a kind of reckoning with that and, leaving that as a jumping off point for the rest of the evening," Pierce said.
Pierce aspires to push ballet towards innovative storytelling, particularly narratives that connect with the queer experience. This piece serves as her example, demonstrating the potential for such artistic evolution.
"[These women] have trained for this, it's the thing that they've wanted so, so much, maybe their whole lives. But then when they get there, it's the thing that kind of hurts them the deepest and I think that there's a connection to that with ballet and a lot of queer people."
These connections are what allowed for dancers such as Anya Hidalgo - an openly lesbian principal dancer in an American ballet company come together for this performance.
Queer the Ballet's debut during New York City's Pride holds particular significance for Pierce, furthering her mission to celebrate queer voices in ballet.
"The significance that June holds with, for instance, the Stonewall riots and the, the spirit of defiance, the fight for life, the fight for representation and I feel very proud to be able to like put on an explicitly queer work and safely do so," Pierce said.
"I'm incredibly, incredibly proud to be a part of the queer community and it just feels like it's our time to have fun and find the joy in community," she adds.
Pierce proudly continues to embrace her queerness even more in her artistic choices. "l'm kind of stepping into a place of more self-acceptance for myself and allowing myself to take up truly and wholly queer space," she said.
While there's still so much work to be done, Pierce remains committed to creating queer work, being as loud as possible and being part of a legacy of community and acceptance that Queer the Ballet continuing to build.
"Even just within my tiny microcosm of the ballet world, some young ballet dancer can now Google queer ballet or lesbian ballet dancer and there'll be content there for them. That might save one small artistic performer or person to feel like they're not alone," Pierce said.
Through this approach, she brings together dancers from diverse backgrounds and unites them with her vision for Queer the Ballet. This fosters artistic expression that heals and inspires.
"I get so many dancers who say 'I had to leave ballet. I didn't feel like it had space for me.' or 'I waited my whole life to see this representation and I'm so happy to know that there's work like this."
"I think watching the dancers also bond and heal together is also so gratifying. There's a world in which no matter who you are, you can get there too and you can feel seen. It's just beautiful."