Gentleman Jack: It Felt Practically Revolutionary

When choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa asked me to join the creative team for Northern Ballet’s new production of Gentleman Jack, I had to say “yes.” It felt practically revolutionary for a classical ballet company to want to tell a lesbian story—in this case, the story of Yorkshire’s favourite lesbian, Anne Lister.

Almost three years after my initial conversation with Annabelle about what it would mean to transform a local-story-turned-hit-tv-series (Sally Wainwright’s BBC/HBO television series, also named Gentleman Jack) into a ballet, Gentleman Jack the ballet is heading to the stage. Audiences in Leeds and beyond are about to see a character based on a real woman who lived her life exactly as she wanted, despite formidable social pressure to do otherwise.

I come to the role of dramaturg—a position that is an amalgam of researcher, storyteller, and audience advocate—by way of a lifelong love of ballet. I also come to the role of dramaturg as a scholar of dance, gender, and sexuality. From these overlapping vantage points, I’ve long been interested in the role of women in dance, particularly ballet, where there is a sometimes paradoxical situation around gender: women are in the majority in most ballet schools and studios and are some of the grittiest, physically daring people in the dance world, yet most women in ballet only get to perform roles shaped around idealized versions of femininity. While there’s nothing wrong with loving a good princess role, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s career-long emphasis on creating ballets centered on great women from history suggests there is room for a greater range of representation of women in ballet. The hundreds, probably thousands, of people who have flocked to see her ballets about Frida Kahlo, Coco Chanel, and Eva Peron among others—demonstrates that audiences are eager to see the exceptional women in ballet companies take on telling the stories of exceptional women in history.

There is no doubt that Anne Lister was an exceptional woman—a Regency era Yorkshire woman sometimes described as the “first modern lesbian” and infamous for the detailed, coded diary she kept that chronicled her exploits with other women. (Her diary also includes her plans to raise her family’s class status and her dedication to learning Latin, Greek, mathematics and more—both desires, entrepreneurship and scholarship, not usually publicly sought by women of her time.)

These traits certainly make Lister a spectacular, perhaps even shocking choice for a ballet. She eschewed relationships with men, upsetting ballet’s usual narrative emphasis on women—even leading women—being only as important as the heterosexual coupling balletic narratives usually drive them to seek. Dance scholar Sally Banes calls this common arc ballet’s “wedding plot,” noting that it extends back to the genre’s origins in the royal court. Many early ballets were created to be performed at wedding celebrations, with marriage often being the central theme of ballets themselves and the occasion that surrounded their performances. While it is Anne Lister’s lesbian exploits that have gained her the most notoriety—obvious “exceptional woman” status—Lister’s refusal of conventional marriage was, as Lister scholar Jill Liddington notes, perhaps even more exceptional, especially since, in the period when Lister lived (1791-1840),  marrying a man would have been a more straightforward route (pun intended) to expanding her family’s property.

The fact that Anne Lister went about things in the most ambitious, yet most difficult manner makes her a fantastic ballet character. As you’ll see from the first moments Gentleman Jack takes the stage, she is a strong woman, capable of intervening in a world stacked against her. As you’ll see in the pas de deux she has with the women she loved—first her peer and lifelong friend Mariana Lawton (nee Belcombe) and then heiress and her eventual wife Ann Walker—putting Lister at the centre of a ballet opens a fantastic range of options for what it might look like to be a woman in ballet. And as you’ll see in the ballet’s second act, marriage might not require men, nor does a woman’s marital status have the last word on what constitutes her legacy.

Header image Gemma Coutts as Anne Lister in Gentleman Jack, photo by Guy Farrow.