@silverwhittlingknife - Tumblr Blog

masterlist of posts

general links:

dick & tim reading guide if you’d like to hear my pitch on why they’re fun & see a nerdy annotated spreadsheet of their individual + joint comic appearances!

comic montages: Dick + Tim accident report in the tall weeds, Dick + Tim comic book guide to older sibling response, Dick + Tim i made myself into someone who could catch you, Dick + Jason antigone by jean anouilh (others in the tag)

this post has gotten way too long sfdsfdsfs anyway even more below the cut if you’re curious <3

#i can't actually make sense of half my tags so i've given up and made a masterpost

natalieironside

Mad At You Island is where the events of William Shakespeare's The Tempest take place

#laugh tag #literature #sdfdsfdsfds

nnschneider

The difference between décidé (decided) and décédé (deceased) is small and very grave.

#liking this post but shaking my head to indicate that i disapprove of puns on principle #laugh tag

comic fans before spreadsheets

Letter column in Detective Comics 376, June 1968.

#''if you don't know how to type LEARN!'' enchants me sdfdsfs

I would like to direct your attention to

them

#so true #dick&tim

thehmn

Foxes disguised as monks. On the left from Japan and on the right from Denmark.

crabs-and-bedbugs

It was a global problem

#laugh tag

sreppub

brotherism: fuck up tim's hair

#thank you artist you are a treasure among us #<333 #dick&tim

dwarven-beard-spores

Starting a gofundme for my friend Bunbury who's a terrible invalid,

#laugh tag #literature

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.”

#!!!!!!#unnameable humanity tag

viceisvice

currentlycryingaboutlancelot

obviously this is AI generated slop but I keep laughing at ophelia labeled “hamlet’s brother”

currentlycryingaboutlancelot

very interested in the 523 likes in the corner supporting this groundbreaking interpretation of ophelia

currentlycryingaboutlancelot

king blyssffsttt my good friend king blyssffsttt

currentlycryingaboutlancelot

#dsfdsfdsfds DYING #literature #laugh tag

rowanisawriter

imo the pov character should be lying to themselves and concealing shit from themselves constantly

rowanisawriter

interrupting others who might say something revealing or important, thinking around things, using words like “didn’t” or “doesn’t” or “imagines” to describe actions not taken or half taken, dreaming things and never talking about them or thinking about them during waking hours, lying to people, hiding true feelings, sitting in shadow or low light to keep any accidental flicker of emotion hidden, writing in obtuse ways that doesn’t let the reader know what they’re thinking or planning, avoiding adverbs in tense moments, describing actions in straightforward and almost clinical ways sometimes, hiding the truth from the character and the reader even though you both know or suspect but there is just enough space there to fill with doubt

#story talk #YES #i love it when narrators are not self-aware #and i also love it when they ARE self-aware but in denial. they refuse to think about things that they don't want to think about #it's my favorite thing about prose because #you have no one but the narrator!!! everything is filtered through this person you can't trust #you get to piece together the puzzle of everything they see & don't see & don't admit to themselves #not just about other people but about themselves <3

daughter-of-sapph0

tw lying

Keep reading

#i got so lied to...#<- prev tags same :(

selfship-quotes

I love soulmates but also this-

qilingxiong

#<333 #story talk

austerity-audacity-asceticism

Song of Songs, 8:6-7

Stern as death is love.

#literature

asinglebluefeline

Tim: *feeling kinda awkward bc people keep mistaking him for Dr Mid-Nite, would rather nobody mention how similar his suit is*

Pieter: "Red Robin looks uncomfortable, I'll try to lighten the mood with a joke :)"

I wish they teamed up during one catastrophe or other. If only for the running joke of their respective teammates constantly mistaking them for each other in the chaos.

Inspired by:

Red Robin #9

Batgirl (2009) #8

#love him <3 #tim drake

thememedaddy

#laugh tag

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