Quatsch mit Soße

This blog is a mess. Possible content includes, but is not limited to: complaining, women, books, lush colour schemes, anything pertaining to the Balkans, Germany, and Latin America (though I can promise absolutely zero Spain content), and writing research (currently: early 1920s/Berlin). She/her.

[marblegauze]

Portrait of Renée Vivien by Otto Wegener circa. 1900

[thedeadleafs]

Renée Vivien was a British poet who wrote in the French language. A high-profile lesbian writer in Paris during the Belle Époque era, she is widely considered to be one of the first noteworthy lesbian poets of the twentieth century.

[spidersinmysoup]

Dios es paraguayo

[astillaz]

en el septimo dia dios se hizo un tereré y descanso

[spidersinmysoup]

El cuerpo y la sangre de cristo :

[vamptual]

i'm sure most of you must've heard about the earthquakes in venezuela yesterday (june 24th). the magnitudes were 7.2 and 7.5 respectively; while felt throughout the country the most affected zones have been la guaira and caracas, with some places being reduced to dust and the number of injures and casualties climbing up. this is not a country that's prepared to deal with any, let alone this, kind of emergency, so any help that could be extended to us would be really appreciated.

i haven't seen many options for people outside to donate. easiest way is this fundraiser from the I Love Venezuela Foundation

Donate to Emergency Relief for Venezuela Earthquake Victims, organized by I Love Venezuela Foundation

Venezuela needs our help now. After a devastating earthqu… I Love Venezuela Foundation needs your support for Emergency Relief for Venez

you can also donate directly through zelle and binance to Organizacion Solo con Fe in barquisimeto, but !!! make sure to label it "donacion" so it can be correctly identified. everything will be used for relief in the affected zones.

lastly, Passagio is a Miami-based courier that's put a special fare of $4/lb for aid to be sent to venezuela. no profits will be made from this, that's strictly transportation costs. they're accepting: medicine, non-perishable food, hygiene products, clothing, essential supplies.

View this post on Instagram

you can donate at your own discretion and screen any and all of these as you wish, obviously. any help and signal boosting is extremely appreciated, and if i find other means for help to be sent directly i'll add them.

[vamptual]

found another! an emergency service from barquisimeto - AIEM, is going as a rescue team to la guaira. they're accepting donations via zelle as well

[vamptual]

another fundraiser! a ton of currencies accepted !!!

Venezuela Earthquake Relief https://giving.gofundme.com/campaign/815513/donate

[vamptual]

yummy rides has opened a page for donations and them + allied companies are matching 25% up to certain amounts!

Dona con Yummy 💜

Suma tu donación y ayuda a quienes más lo necesitan.

there's another gofundme as well, co-organized by someone i know. it's super far from the goal as of right now, so if it's within your means please donate here

Donate to Buy Emergency Supplies for Venezuela, organized by David Vero

The 7.5 and 7.2 magnitude earthquakes have devastated parts of Venezuela. I am trying … David Vero needs your support for Buy Emergency Supp

[vamptual]

for those interested in helping from brazil, a friend of mine organized this fundraiser

https://www.vakinha.com.br/vaquinha/povo-venezuelano-precisa-de-ajuda

[vamptual]

this post has several resources for people abroad, some i've previously added on this post. i would personally suggest focusing on the contacts in the first and last slides as that seems to me the quickest way to get the money to collection centers

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[relaxnotshaveeyebrows]

best part of the world cup so far is the commentators qualifying everything the canadian team does for the first time with “for the men’s national team” because the women have done it already

[enchantedbook]

"St. Catherine of Siena besieged by demons" c. 1500 Unknown Artist

[buckysknifecollection]

i feel like the youth should be reminded that the point of shipping is not for a ship to become canon. the point of shipping is to collect all the canon crumbs like starved mice, run away cackling and make some fun little scenarios with them just for the hell of it.

[toyastales]

1905 Lacloche Frères Pig Bag

Discover the quirky and whimsical allure of this pig-shaped evening bag, a dazzling 1905 creation by Lacloche Frères. With ruby eyes and diamond details, this signed, numbered, and hallmarked piece from Sotheby's Collection is a true objet d'art.

[draconym]

do you think two pennies is still enough for the ferryman or has inflation driven up the fare

[draconym]

if he makes me use an app I am simply not crossing the river Styx.

[twobeesornottwobees]

printers behave like that because the medieval monks they put out of work are haunting them

[mlleclaudine]

‘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.”

[dame-de-pique]

Arthur E Morton - Fucshia, 1910-1915

[starrynightsforever]

I keep seeing people say that the male and female leads on [insert popular show being released currently] are “JUST LIKE Mulder and Scully from The X-Files (1993-2018),” and while I hate to be the bearer of bad news, I’m afraid I must inform you that whatever Faustian bargain Chris Carter made to put so many Vibes in the pilot episode of The X-Files (1993-2018) actually prevents Mulder and Scully from ever being replicated ever again in any form of media. They may be the blueprint, but they cannot be touched by modern television no matter how hard people try. Sincerest condolences.

[icedteainthatbag]

that’s it that’s the whole show in one gif

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

this and also there’s something very beautiful about watching in progress fics grow. shout out to in progress fics <3

[segamascott]

[godserene]

[latinotiktok]

[vetchtibbles]

I think I’m falling behind in pop culture can we stop writing books and making movies until I catch up. something crazy is about to happen to gilgamesh