Anne Lister & Ann Walker
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Kiana Khansmith

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

JVL
dirt enthusiast
art blog(derogatory)

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

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Discoholic 🪩
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Three Goblin Art
todays bird
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

Andulka
NASA
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Claire Keane

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@chachatango
Anne Lister & Ann Walker
‘Gentleman Jack’ Brings a Quiet Revolution to Ballet
Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s new ballet, based on the life of one of the first modern lesbians, is changing how dancers view their traditional roles.
by Laura Cappelle - The New York Times, March 2, 2026
One morning last August, the female dancers of Northern Ballet tried something most of them had never done before: partnering each other.
In one of the company’s studios in Leeds, England, there were giggles and some near falls. Carefully but eagerly, the dancers tried to steady their partners on pointe — in ballet, usually the task of men. By lunchtime Federico Bonelli, the director of Northern Ballet, was demonstrating the correct way to hold out an arm for support — palm up, not too close to the body, at bellybutton level — to women in line for coffee.
“It’s the opposite,” said the dancer Nida Aydinoglu, 20, miming how she usually gives her hand to a male partner, palm down.
“It’s just a new technique,” Bonelli replied with a smile.
Six months later, Aydinoglu and her female colleagues are now flying through closely entangled lifts and turns — and will soon showcase them in a landmark new work that premieres on March 7 at Leeds Grand Theater: “Gentleman Jack,” Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s adaptation of the 2019 television series about Anne Lister, a 19th-century English landowner known as one of the first modern lesbians.
For most of ballet history, heterosexual romance has been the default. Telling Lister’s story is a quiet revolution. Openly queer characters are a rarity in the art form’s repertoire, and allusions to romance between women are always fleeting: a scene in Bronislava Nijinska’s 1924 ballet “Les Biches”; a pas de deux in Roland Petit’s “Proust” half a century later; a kiss in Wayne McGregor’s “Woolf Works,” a 2015 production inspired by Virginia Woolf.
Rachael Gillespie, foreground left, and Gemma Coutts in a rehearsal for “Gentleman Jack.” Sophie Stafford for The New York Times
By contrast, Lopez Ochoa offers an intimate, in-depth look at Lister’s relationships with two of her long-term lovers: Mariana Lawton, who has chosen to be married to a man over staying with her, and Ann Walker, a local heiress whom she “marries” in a secret, symbolic ceremony. Both women are described at length in Lister’s diaries, which were partly encrypted to hide her sexuality.
“To actually have a ballet centered on a queer woman — that’s a really radical shift,” said Clare Croft, a dance historian and theorist at the University of Michigan, and the dramaturg for “Gentleman Jack.”
The idea came to Bonelli, he said, after he was appointed to lead Northern Ballet in 2022. The company of 36 dancers has long specialized in storytelling, and boasts a repertoire of original ballets inspired by literary works and historical figures, like David Nixon’s “Wuthering Heights” and Cathy Marston’s “Victoria,” based on Queen Victoria.
Yet Bonelli wanted to diversify the stories ballet often tackles, and “Gentleman Jack” “felt right in so in so many ways,” he said in February. In Yorkshire, the English region that is home to Northern Ballet, Lister is also a local celebrity: Her estate, Shibden Hall, is about a 20-minute drive from Leeds and open to the public for visits.
When Bonelli pitched the idea to Lopez Ochoa, an in-demand Belgian Colombian choreographer who has created a number of biographical ballets, her answer was a resounding yes. Her interest in gender fluidity had already led her to develop a script with the writer Luke Jennings for a ballet adaptation of “The Danish Girl,” the 2015 film inspired by the life of the pioneering transgender woman Lili Elbe.
But no ballet company wanted to produce it, Lopez Ochoa said, adding: “They told us, ‘We think our patrons wouldn’t want that.’”
Left, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, the ballet's choreographer. Sophie Stafford for The New York Times
She could relate to Lister’s struggle with gender norms. Lopez Ochoa “wanted to be a boy” growing up in Belgium, she said, and struggled with ballet’s expectations of dainty femininity throughout her training as a dancer. “I wanted to be taken seriously,” she said, “to have a voice.”
In “Gentleman Jack,” the women performing Lister’s role have had to undo some of their classical training, too. For most of the ballet, they are in flat shoes rather than the more unstable pointe shoes, to allow them to be more grounded. They also wield canes and have gotten sore arms from lifting their partners, albeit not overhead. “The more you allow yourself to take space, the better it is,” Lopez Ochoa told them in rehearsal.
To help the dancers, Croft, the dramaturg, showed them video compilations of the commanding walk developed by Suranne Jones, the British actor who played Lister on television. “She looks like she’s always on a mission,” said Gemma Coutts, a 24-year-old dancer who is set to dance Lister on opening night. Instead of stretching her feet elegantly, Coutts had to think “heel-toe”: “I’m not just wafting off the stage,” she said. “I’m going from A to B.”
For Coutts, who said she usually gets “nervous and shy in front of a lot of people,” playing the unapologetic Lister has been confidence boosting. “Gemma has come out of her shell,” said her colleague Julie Nunès, who plays Ann Walker.
The women of Northern Ballet have also embraced portraying same-sex romance. “I think they are less prude than I am,” Lopez Ochoa said with a laugh. Coutts said that she was a little anxious at first about kissing a woman, but the feeling went away fast. “Female or male now, I realized that I’m just acting,” she said, pointing out that gay men in ballet companies “have to pretend like they’re in love with women all the time.”
For “Gentleman Jack,” Lopez Ochoa, who is straight, put together a creative team that included several members who identify as queer. Croft, who grew up taking ballet classes and later edited a book on queer dance, was especially elated. “Ballet is my first dance love, but the codes of chivalry are so deep in it,” she said. “When it shows up in relation to queerness, it tends to focus more on the men.”
Gillespie, center, as Ann Walker, whom Anne Lister “marries” in a secret, symbolic ceremony. Sophie Stafford for The New York Times
Initiatives like #QueerTheBallet, a collective started by Adriana Pierce to bring queer women and nonbinary artists together during the coronavirus pandemic, have improved visibility in recent years. Pierce, a former New York City Ballet dancer who is now a choreographer, said she has gone “from being the only person I knew to meeting people every day in the New York dance scene who are young and queer.”
Still, challenging ballet’s gender binary through choreography takes the kind of research and time that mainstream ballet rarely provides. “I don’t see a lot of larger companies investing in specifically queer voices and stories, or even anything that’s different,” Pierce said. Queer retellings of ballet stories have come instead from independent artists, like Kade Pyle, who has produced queer versions of classics including “Giselle” and “The Sleeping Beauty” through her company, Ballez.
By contrast, an established company like Northern Ballet, which tours widely around Britain, can bring a story like Lister’s to “a massive audience,” said Croft, who described the “civic function” of the art form: “People take pride in their ballet companies.” One worry for Bonelli was that the male dancers of Northern Ballet would have little to do in a production like “Gentleman Jack,” with only two soloist roles for them. But Lister “lived in a man’s world,” Lopez Ochoa said, and throughout the ballet, she squares off against businessmen to defend her financial interests, as she did in real life.
The men haven’t complained. “People are interested that the company is willing to take this direction,” the dancer George Liang said. “And having a strong woman challenge me onstage is so much fun.” Aydinoglu, who performs the role of Lister, commented with a laugh: “I’ve really enjoyed bossing the men around, I’m not gonna lie.”
“The more you allow yourself to take space, the better it is,” Lopez Ochoa told dancers in rehearsal. Sophie Stafford for The New York Times
Northern Ballet hosted an open rehearsal in January to gather feedback from women from Calderdale Friends of Dorothy, a social support group for lesbians, and a handful of younger queer women. They took their role to heart: In the discussion afterward, a sensual pas de deux between Lister and Walker came under criticism because Lopez Ochoa had opted to have two men — embodying genderless “words,” a reference to Lister’s diaries — carry the women aloft in the scene.
“One of them said, ‘You cannot put men into an intimate moment between two women,’” Lopez Ochoa recalled. “I let it simmer. Then I thought, I have to fix it.” Now, the women are alone onstage.
The group of queer women who sat in on the rehearsal were “blown away,” said Rachel Lappin, the Anne Lister program coordinator for Calderdale Council, who organized the outing. “One member commented that it was the best day out she’d had in decades.”
Support for “Gentleman Jack” has also translated into “incredibly successful” fund-raising for Northern Ballet, Bonelli said. Last year, the project, which is co-produced by the Finnish National Ballet, won the Fedora - Van Cleef & Arpels Dance Prize, a prestigious European award that supports the development of innovative stage productions. A crowdfunding campaign that runs alongside the prize “not only met but surpassed its target,” Edilia Gänz, the director of Fedora, said in an email.
Ahead of the premiere, the dancers of Northern Ballet say the effects of embodying Lister’s bold individuality are already felt. “As a woman, you often try to blend in, even in real life,” Aydinoglu said. “It’s been really, really different to just be my own person. At the end of the day, you don’t need to please everyone.”
And for queer women in dance, “Gentleman Jack” is a special milestone. When asked about it, Croft paused, visibly moved.
“It’s probably telling that I’m trying to catch myself from tearing up,” she said. “It’s rare you get to do something that you never imagined would happen.”
the place I work at remodeled these split gendered restrooms into “inclusive restrooms” and never told us what they meant while construction was ongoing. I need you to know every atom of potential criticism or whining that could’ve happened disappeared when people found out this meant we got 10 fully separate private bathrooms with sinks inside. I’ve not heard a single person crack a joke about the inclusive signage. this is the world TERFs are trying to steal from you
This is called a "superloo" and terfs are actively trying to steal this from you, in the UK they changed bathroom regulations to mean new buildings have to prioritise gendered toilets rather than build superloos.
This also upset a lot of architects and designers who like the superloos. They're also typically more like small rooms rather than having doors you can look under.
I have always felt ‘fuck that’ is an underrated form of happiness. In fact, it might be my very favorite.
Something Spectacular, Alexis Hall
last month i blacked out for 4 hours and painted Stephen Day from KJ Charles's Charm of Magpies books which are a wonderful queer historical fantasy romance series. anyway this asshole is so vivid to me. i told everyone on discord that i wanted him to look angry and malnourished and sickly and to make his freckles as un-cute as possible and everyone enabled me by calling him a perfect angel babygirl who needs a nap and a juice box. the placeholder file name for this painting was "tiny and rotten and bad" and i just never changed it
This is a completely new painting style for me and I also feel like I'm learning how to draw the human form again from scratch lately so pls be nice to me lol
Advice on Endings
I hate ending my stories. I will drag a story on long after it should have ended even though I know it should be done with. If anyone else struggles as well, here is a list of the different types of endings that are common.
Full Circle – Mirror the beginning of the story, show how the tone has shifted from start to end
Bittersweet – Character wins at the cost of something else, creates emotional depth
Emotional resolution – Focuses more on the growth of the characters than the events of the story
Twist – reveal something that changes the readers perspective or understanding
Open – doesn’t answer all the questions or solve all the conflicts of the story, leaving room for interpretation
Quiet – Subtle, reflective ending rather than a dramatic event
Sacrifice – The character has to give something up to achieve a greater goal
Hopeful – Despite the events of the story, there is a distinct sense that everything will be okay
Consequence – Shows how the characters choices throughout the story impact the world or their relationship
Character choice – centers on a decision that defines who the character has become through the story
Steal from everything you love. watched a movie and thought "wow that scene hit different"? figure out why and use it. read a book where the banter made you kick your feet? study it. saw a tiktok that made you Feel Things? that's research. keep a notes app full of random lines you'll never use. screenshot tumblr posts at 4am for "inspiration." your influences should be obvious and chaotic. remix everything. that's not theft that's apprenticeship.
Peachy skies 🍑
Tip jar | Wallpapers | Prints | Twitter | Bluesky
went to a new optometrist today wearing my squid facts ‘save our freaks dont mine the deep’ shirt from @sarahmackattack that has a strawberry squid on it. and i wasn’t even thinking about it but the optometrist walked in and he was like ‘oh what does your shirt say’ so i showed him and he was like ‘oh that’s neat!’ and then i thought he might like to know about strawberry squid eyes since they have weird eyes and he is an optometrist and all. so i was like ‘yeah it’s actually a real kind of squid called a strawberry squid, their eyes are really cool because they have one big yellow-green one and one small blue one’ and he kind of gasped and went ‘oh my god that’s so interesting i wonder why they have that. do you know what their retina composition is like?’ and i watched as he minimized my chart on the computer and started looking up images of strawberry squid and then he googled ‘strawberry squid retina composition’ and he was like ‘sorry we’ll get to your eye exam in a moment i just really want to find out’ LMAO 10/10 optometrist experience will be returning
Constantly trying to figure out the social rules while learning to be myself ✨.
Gothic dreams & the smell of old books 🖤📖
John Rylands Library, Manchester
My photography, 29 XI 2025
There was this one time I scratched up my cornea real bad and had to go to the hospital. Dealing with medical bureaucracy is always very frustrating to me, and that combined with the pain had me in a very bad mood. I was even crying.
I had to wait quite a while for the doctor to see me, but fortunately the nurse who was helping me had an excellent bedside manner and went out of her way to distract me. She expertly did this by getting me talking about books I'd read recently.
I went all in on criticizing the last book I'd read. I don't remember what it was, but I really hadn't liked it, and I denigrated it as "Misery Porn". And she was like "Hmm, that sounds interesting, tell me more". So I gave a general plot synopsis. As I was telling her that most of the characters were immigrant miners, she interrupted me to say "That's interesting, I didn't realize that there were mines in Missouri".
And at that moment time stopped for me and I realized that the entire time I'd been talking about the book, she'd been assuming I was talking about porn set in Missouri. I had just assumed that she had understood from context that when I said "Misery Porn", I meant "A story that is gratuitously depressing so that readers will think it's deeper than it really is".
Rather than being disappointed in our miscommunication, I was instead impressed with the level on non judgement she was showing me. Having a whole ass cheerful conversation about Missouri themed porn just to help a patient. I think about her all the time.
There have now been many responses to this post, but they almost all boil down to just 3 categories.
Nerds (affectionate): Actually, Missouri has many lead mines.
Health care professionals: This is just what working with patients is like.
Missourians: Missouri mentioned!
(puts all the Saint of Steel's paladins in my pocket and rattles them around)
just finished all four currently existing Saint of Steel books and I keep thinking about all these guys
OH MY GOD OH MY GOD I AM SO FREAKING HAPPY
Enjoying his meal
a few weeks ago I bought a tiny library filled with random tiny books (popular titles) but adsom wasn't there, so I decided to make my tiny shades of magic books!! (us editions I own and tftop UK bc I couldn't find the jackets of the other eds)
If you want I could write a tutorial on how to make your tiny books (if you want the file with all these covers I used here, I can share it too)
Because @ouidasart just quite sensibly posted that fabulous Daniel da Silva art, I am inspired to tell the six of you who don't already know about it what I did artwise in the KJ Charles fandom, to wit: All the world knows the covers of the Society of Gentlemen series are wretched, right? Of course right. So I . . . made better ones:
I mean to say. I don't flatter myself that I'm any sort of professional, but anyone who has read even one of those books can probably identify all six of my guys and none of the four in the stock photos—on top of which, I happen to think my series looks more like a series, what with the titles in the same size and arrangement on each cover rather than just slapped on there any which way someone felt like.
It is also Known that these volumes are only available digitally. Never been printed. But you know what you can do with a little initiative?
That's right: You can typeset and print and then bind some goddamn books.
If you're feeling extremely adventurous, you can go ahead and make a custom slipcase for a whole box set, why not. (Stay tuned for that, because I'm coming up against the image limit.)