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.
