Image: Chaoying Rao / @femme.castratrice
Insistence: A Butch Ballet is a new socially engaged dance project by Emma Lewis-Jones and Bishop May Down, working with non-professional performers who identify with butchness through an inclusive tourable model of choreographic containers. The project queers and de-centres conventional dance modalities unison and canon, and deconstructs ballet through contemporary, queer movement.

“There is a tangible energy…an anti-ballet energy, that blurs binaries…the binary of butch and not butch, performer and audience, ballet and not ballet, passive and active, binary and nonbinary, and beyond.”
- Workshop participant

“The playing and the trust…transform the participants themselves, who…weave that play and trust and transformation into their other relationships and spaces”
- Workshop participant

Insistence: A Butch Ballet is currently in initial R&D supported by Creative Scotland, Tramway, Take Me Somewhere, and The Work Room, and Produced by Hacks. More to come soon!