Ballez on Beltane: Sleeping Beauty & the Beast

Friday, May 6, 2016

Is it accidental that this show opened on Beltane? Beltane (or May Day) is the witch holiday when the god and goddess join. It’s a spring celebration around the culmination of desire, the birth of new things, the fertility of spirit and expression. It was also the opening weekend of the new Ballez production Sleeping Beauty & the Beast, which opened last Friday, and is at La Mama Moves! experimental dance festival through May 8th. Hurry, there may still be tickets!

Ballez is a dance company that celebrates the history and performances of lesbian, queer and transgender people. Director Katy Pyle re-imagines the narratives of story ballets and their archetypal characters to reflect multiplicity of identity, desire and expression.

Sleeping Beauty & the Beast is a two-act Ballez spanning two theaters and two eras of L.E.S. activist history. I settle into my seat at La Mama on E 4thSt. almost feeling the history right under my butt. Tchaikovsky’s classic score is played live by the Queer Urban Orchestra – which sits practically under the u-shape audience risers in the Ellen Stewart Theatre

For the opening prologue, an ensemble of female-identified/assigned dancers takes the stage. The program refers to them as “witches”, and their weaving dance is a veritable maypole. The dancers duck under and climb over an increasingly complex net of threads and grow increasingly interconnected as their complexly gendered bodies weave.

Photo: Theo Coté

This is a “story ballet,” so on to the story: Act I is set in 1893, and the narrative revolves around Sleeping Beauty as a young girl who works in a New York garment factory. Three men as dancing faeries are the colors of my favorite spring flowers — Scarlet, Azure and Lilac – and they bless the birth of Aurora (Beauty, played by Madion Krekel) to the factory owners. Dyke cousin Carabosse (Deborah Lohse) shows up as an awesomely bad influence. The female ensemble reappears as garment workers, and the Union Organizer (The Beast, played by Jules Skloot) agitates on behalf of the workers. One more May Day reference! (Okay, I’ll move on.) Aurora performs a gender-reversed pas de deux with the Lilac Faerie (Chris De Vita) where she lifts and twirls him, then pricks her finger on a spinning wheel and falls in love with the Union Leader. Lilac Faerie casts a spell on all, and they collapse to the stage floor to sleep. The program calls it a “die-in.”

House lights up, we all get up and go downstairs, collecting our belongings and fumbling for ticket stubs. Nice way to jump forward a hundred years in time!

Photo: Theo Coté

The Downstairs Theater is a nightclub in the 1990’s, with original house music compilations by JD Samson. The cast is asleep on the floor – same positions, different costumes. Carabosse is now the Club Mistress, the garment workers are club goers and storybook characters, and the faeries are part of a white-brief-and-crew-sock clad male-identified ensemble who reference the AIDS crisis as they perform an exhausted ballet, dying off one my one. A series of BDSM duets evoke love and struggle, while “lesbian activists” carry off each collapsed swan. Beauty, in a magenta mini-dress, and The Beast, in leather chaps, enact their own climactic duet of pain and desire, which is followed by the tired dance of the last swan, Lilac Faerie, who is finally carried out by the ensemble in a silent procession.

Photo: Theo Coté

Director Katy Pyle’s works explore fantasy, transformation, queer failure and the lineage of performance. I love this risky place she’s inhabited with her gender-queer cast, whose very bodies challenge expectations before they’ve even begun to move. Yes, this is a perfect spring performance. It’s newer, lighter-trod ground. It’s vital, like tender, spring shoots, risking failure as they ripen, blooming possibility. Thank you, beautiful, original dancers and players. I will gladly dance around your maypole and strike with your union. Blessed be!

You haven't yet gone?  No promises, but there may still be tickets here.

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