A couple dance across the studio, their movements formal, the mood resigned. The man pulls his partner towards him but she spins away, landing face to face with another woman. Now the two women dance and everything is different: bright and playful as their eyes meet. It ends in a clinch behind a bookcase. The great love is not between the woman, Mariana, and her husband, but between Mariana and Anne Lister, also known as Gentleman Jack.
I’m watching this play out in a rehearsal room at Northern Ballet in Leeds, where choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa is in the midst of creating a ballet version of Gentleman Jack, as popularised in Sally Wainwright’s hit TV series (Wainwright is a consultant on the ballet). Lister was a 19th-century landowner running her family’s estate in Halifax, but is better known for the diaries that revealed her passionate lesbian love affairs and for boldly living an unconventional life for the times.
Lopez Ochoa, who is Belgian-Colombian and lives in Amsterdam, had never heard of Lister when the ballet was proposed to her, but after binge-watching the series she said yes. “The woman, I mean, she’s a force!” says Lopez Ochoa. “She is audacious. She is in her power. She’s unafraid, inspiring. There is a little bit of edge to her. She’s not very kind, she’s not a hero – but that’s what makes her interesting.”
The ballet focuses on the two most important women in Lister’s life. Mariana Lawton was Lister’s great love across 20 years, but she followed convention (and financial security) and married a man. Later came Ann Walker – she and Lister took holy communion together, in an act of commitment before God they considered a “marriage”, and lived together until Lister’s death in 1840.
What Lopez Ochoa appreciates about Lister is her smarts: “How she behaved around men to get what she wanted. She really used her brains. This I could relate to, in this male-dominated choreographic world, where I had always the feeling that I had to prove myself.”
Lopez Ochoa could also relate to not being “conventionally” feminine. As a child, she would wear her brothers’ clothes, and people often thought she was a boy. “The kids of the neighbourhood were trying to feel my crotch to check,” she says. “So I was sent to ballet – because I did not behave nor look like a girl.” You can see in photos, she says, how after two years of dancing her body had changed. “The physiognomy of my face, everything – I looked more feminine.” She lifts her chin in a balletic pose.
Lopez Ochoa didn’t lose her assertiveness, though, and nor did people stop telling her to change. She remembers being 17, in a ballet class, and saying out loud that the choreography was uncomfortable. “The teacher turned around and said, ‘You with your big mouth, you’re gonna get into trouble.’” But Lopez Ochoa got into choreography instead. “Nothing can really change you,” she says. “I’m still the tomboy. I just don’t look like it. But your thought process stays the same.”
Over the last two decades, she has created more than 100 dances for companies around the world, including ballets based on the lives of Frida Kahlo, Coco Chanel and Eva Perón, so she knows about making portraits of strong and complicated women. In terms of creating Lister through dance, Lopez Ochoa says it came step by step as they developed the work, rather than being decided in advance. The dancers cast in the lead role (Gemma Coutts, Amber Lewis and Nida Aydinoğlu) are women who “dared to take up the space”, says Lopez Ochoa. “They were fearless, and not afraid of being ‘ugly’ in classical ballet terms.”
In the same way that the real Lister wore men’s clothes, the dancer playing Lister will wear flat shoes rather than pointes (except for in the communion scene), which means she can be more grounded when partnering the other women. The women can’t do the same big lifts a man would, so they’re having to work out other ways to create climactic moments.
Romantic female pas de deux are a rarity in ballet and Lopez Ochoa is aiming to avoid cliche, including the acrobatic splits you often see in passionate duets. “It’s just going to be different, curvier, more sinuous,” she says. Do they kiss? Not yet, she says, there are movements to express love better, but perhaps after the “wedding” scene. Are the dancers cool with it? “Yeah, I thought they were going to be much more reserved,” she says, “but I came here last year to workshop with them and they were like, ‘Let’s get raunchy!’”
The TV series has an ardent fanbase. It has even been life-changing for some women who’ve realised – or made peace with – their own sexuality after hearing Lister’s story. Lopez Ochoa hopes the same thing could be true for ballet, where there are many out gay men but, for example, a lesbian dancer Lopez Ochoa knows still feels she can’t widely come out. “When I told her I was doing Gentleman Jack as a ballet,” says Lopez Ochoa, “she was bawling.”
• Gentleman Jack is at Leeds Grand theatre, 7-14 March; then touring
