Ballet Queer Press

Featured in Evening Standard Magazine 30/05/24

Punk is not the only thing on the menu for London queering.

Ballet Queer, the UK's first LGBTQIA+ ballet company founded by Jonathan Watkins last September, is doing the same for dance. 'Ballet, in my opinion, is queer and has always been queer. There's always been queer people around ballet, he says. 'I want to reclaim that narrative.'

Watkins, who was with the Royal Ballet for a decade and a freelance choreographer for 10 years after that, is running an artistic residency at Shoreditch Town Hall, as well as a community dance project for up to 50 Hackney residents, which is running for six weeks.

Our first professional piece will be a nod to people in ballet and dance history who have been revolutionary in terms of their queerness. Vaslav Nijinsky [the great Russian dancer] and Sergei Diaghilev [founder of Ballet Russes] were queer. Isadora Duncan is a queer dancer from the 19th century,' he says. 'I want to launch the company with a performance that nods to the past but has its roots in the history of now.'