Living My Truth Out Loud: Embracing Human Expression
By Brittni Bryan, Former DWC Ambassador
“Human expression on the most natural level is non-binary”
Click below to shop the look:
“Human expression on the most natural level is non-binary,” said Ashton Edwards, former Dancewear Center (DWC) Ambassador, in an interview for the DWC Blog. Ashton is a dancer with Pacific Northwest Ballet, and an exquisite one. I’ve been following them on Instagram since they partnered with the DWC Ambassador program in 2020. They inspire me and give me hope because when I was growing up, queer dancers were invisible.
In 2009, the year I graduated high school, Nigel Lythgoe of So You Think You Can Dance infamously and harshly critiqued a pair of same-sex ballroom auditionees saying, “I think you’d probably alienate a lot of our audience. We’ve always had the guys dance together on the show, but they’ve never really done it in each other’s arm’s before. I’m certainly one of those people that really like to see guys be guys and girls be girls on stage,” Nigel said. I watched the episode when it originally aired, sitting in my first girlfriend’s basement bedroom. We weren’t dating yet. Neither of us were out yet, and in fact, I hadn’t even realized I was in love with her yet. But, I remember watching that episode with her and I remember being upset. That was the representation I got: a pair of ballroom dancers condemned for their sexuality on national television— their technique and talent mostly ignored. The focus was on the binary of traditional partnering pairs and how this pairing was abnormal in comparison.
In December of 2012, Washington state became one of the first three states in the US to legally recognize gay marriage through popular vote. I was living in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood at the time, finishing up my bachelor’s degree at Seattle University. I still wasn’t fully out, but my roommate and I walked to the Pike/Pine corridor where people celebrated this long fought for human right on the streets, the excitement frenzied and palpable. The next year, I started dancing for a local production company on Capitol Hill. It was a queer-run dinner theater that primarily found success in hosting 21st birthdays and bachelorette parties. I danced there on and off for four years. During that time, gay marriage was federally legalized in the United States. At some point, I choreographed a “romantic” lyrical/contemporary routine for myself and one of our male dancers. We needed an understudy but none of our other male dancers could execute the technique, so I suggested one of the other girls should understudy. Our owner and director, a gay man, agreed, saying it would be okay for a female to understudy the male part because it would be artistic, not sexual or romantic. But what if it was sexual and romantic, and why couldn’t it be? Just a few years later, the male-presenting dancer I originally partnered with began her transition from a male-presenting body to a female-presenting body. The whole time, I had been dancing with a woman anyway.
Click below to shop the look:
It was not until 2019 that I saw anything in the dance world that validated my sexuality. Kiara Felder, 29, of Les Grands Ballet and formerly a principal with Atlanta Ballet, was interviewed by Dance Magazine for an article on Pride and dance. In a section called, “Could I Be a Ballet Dancer and Be a Lesbian”, Felder discusses the fractured relationship between her sexuality and her professional dance career. She describes how she stayed in the closet at the beginning of her career, “worried that she'd lose her scholarship at PNB [our very own Pacific Northwest Ballet] if the administration found out she was gay”. As she continued her career and moved to Atlanta, she found her community amongst some of the gay male dancers. However, she still struggled to find other queer women in dance. Her struggle, my struggle, and probably the struggle of many young, queer, female dancers, revolved around representation. Felder said, “Without representation, I started to feel this pressure and fear. "Could I be a ballet dancer and be lesbian?". Lesbian stereotypes focus on the masculinity of gay women: softball players, basketball players, soccer players, etc. Athletic gay women are stereotypically found in male-dominated sports, not in the feminine world of ballet. Except that we are. We’re here, and the outdated, binaried beliefs in dance are keeping us in the closet.
This brings us full circle back to Ashton in 2021. Ashton is breaking gender boundaries in the very same ballet company that Felder was afraid to come out in. They are the first biologically male dancer to study en pointe with Pacific Northwest Ballet and train in traditionally female roles. And they are only eighteen! Ashton is just at the beginning of their career, and I cannot wait to see how the dance community evolves as queer dancers continue to find themselves mirrored in dancers like Ashton or Kiara Felder or Alonso Guzman or Travis Wall or Ashley Yergens or Emma Portner or Nick Lazzarini or James Whiteside or Kyle Abraham or Mollee Gray and her partner Jeka Jane.
I finally came out in 2016, but sometimes I still feel uncomfortable being openly queer today. But then I see Ashton, living their truth out loud in one of the best ballet companies on the West Coast, and I see how much things have changed since I was eighteen. I’m excited to continue to see dance embrace non-binaried castings and non-binaried expressions because Ashton is right, human expression is not inherently binaried. We’ve just made it that way.
So, what can we do to help society accept dance as a non-binaried art form?
One way we can help is by normalizing same-sex partnering and supporting artists who choreograph duets between partners of the same sex, particularly ones with themes of intimacy or romance. Examples include Lauren Lovette’s pas de deux between Preston Chamberlee and Taylor Stanley in the ballet “Not Our Fate,” Justin Peck’s same sex pairing in “The Times Are Racing,” and Joshua Beamish’s work in “Saudade”. When audiences only see romantic duets performed between a man and a woman, it perpetuates the dominant idea that heterosexual love is the only kind of love acceptable to see onstage and offstage. Additionally, when queer dancers only see heterosexuality portrayed onstage, it can make them feel underrepresented and like their experiences aren’t worth depicting. But artists have the opportunity to help change this by creating work that challenges the norm. Choreographers in particular, can help by actively choreographing duets that aren’t performed by man-woman pairings to challenge the norm of heterosexual romance in dance.
Click below to shop the look:
In dance classes, we can aid in normalizing the use of non-binaried language in our teaching. Oftentimes, teachers use language that defaults to heterosexuality as the “norm”. However, this is damaging because when people assume the sexuality of someone they are denying the existence of other identities, reinforcing the normalized identity as the “correct” way to identify, and erasing the ability for young people to see alternate identities as valid. People often assume someone is straight until they “come out”, but this is not the case. We can challenge ourselves to not assume the sexuality of others by being more inclusive with our language. For example, in 2014, I started saying “guy or girl” to describe the idea of being flirtatious in jazz styling instead of just “guy”. Seemingly small changes like this can help many of us start to retrain our brains to think in ways that aren’t dominated by heterosexuality.
So, when you see artists in your community creating works that confront heteronormativity, support them in any way you can, whether that be buying tickets to their shows, sharing their work with others, or finding ways to collaborate. If you are an artist, particularly a heterosexual artist, challenge yourself to create work that promotes diverse identities in an effort to continue to break down the barriers of society’s obsession with the gender binary and allow for a deeper exploration into the human experience through art.
