JOSEPH TOONGA - UK

05/17/22 • 44 min

DOWNTIME - interviews with dance artists & arts leaders, talking about dance & the arts

Joseph Toonga is from East London. He makes and performs dance productions that tell stories of the under-represented, relevant to the here and now which are embedded in the languages of contemporary dance and Hip Hop. Joseph is Artistic Director of Just Us Dance Theatre, has created work for Edge; National Youth Ballet of Germany; Richard Alston Dance Company and Junior Ballet Madrid. He is also co-founder of Artists 4 Artists and recently became The Royal Ballet’s first Emerging Choreographer.

Lou talked to Joseph in April 2022 about his commitment to finding, making and sharing space; his desire to create dance in numerous contexts in order to tell the real stories of the under-represented; and the challenges of forging a path in new contexts that don’t yet feel like home.
http://www.justusdancetheatre.com

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KATY PYLE - USA

New York based Katy Pyle is a genderqueer lesbian dancer and choreographer who founded their dance company Ballez in 2011 to explore their complicated relationship to the cis-hetero patriarchal form of ballet, and to make space for their own, and their communities’, presence within it. The mission is to reimagine ballet through collaborative, community-minded, and antihierarchical approaches.

Katy is working to insert the herstory and lineage of lesbian, queer and transgender people into the ballet canon through the creation of large-scale story ballets, open classes, and public engagement. Major works include “The Firebird, a Ballez,” which has a lesbian princess and a “tranimal”—part bird, part prince), “Sleeping Beauty & the Beast,”which you’ll hear all about later in the episode, and most recently "Giselle of Loneliness," staged in 2021.

As a dancer Katy has appeared in the works of Ivy Baldwin, Faye Driscoll, Xavier Le Roy, Karinne Keithley Syers, Jennifer Monson, StinaNyberg and many others.

Lou spoke to Katy when they were in New York in May 2022. Wetalked about Katy’s journey in, out and back in to ballet, their refusal to bow to the traumatic oppression and limitations of the ballet world, and their realisation that they didn’t have to change themselves – they could change ballet instead.
https://www.ballez.org

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/ballez-katy-pyle-giselle-of-loneliness/2021/06/01/23f9897c-bfd0-11eb-b26e-53663e6be6ff_story.html