“Let’s be lewd!” Gentleman Jack, the TV series about a plucky lesbian landowner, is back as a ballerina | Dance

A A couple dances around the studio, their movements formal, the mood resigned. The man pulls his partner toward him but she spins away, landing face-to-face with another woman. Now the two women dance and everything becomes different: bright and cheerful where their eyes meet. It ends at a point behind the 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 in the rehearsal room of Northern Ballet in Leeds, where choreographer Anabel Lopez Ochoa is creating a ballet version of Gentleman Jack, as made famous in Sally Wainwright’s hit TV series (Wainwright is a ballet consultant). Lister was a 19th-century landowner who managed her family’s estate in Halifax, but she is best known for her memoirs, which revealed her passionate lesbian love affairs and boldly living an unconventional life for the time.

Lopez Ochoa, a Belgian-Colombian living in Amsterdam, had never heard of Lester when she was offered the ballet, but after watching the series, she said yes. “Women, I mean, they’re a force!” Lopez Ochoa says. “She’s bold. She’s at her best. She’s unafraid, and she’s inspiring. There’s a little bit of an edge about her. She’s not very nice, and 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. Marianna Lawton was Leicester’s great love for 20 years, but she followed tradition (and financial security) and married a man. Ann Walker came later – she and Lester took the Eucharist together, in a commitment to God they considered “marriage”, and they lived together until Lester’s death in 1840.

What Lopez Ochoa appreciated about Leicester was her intelligence: “How she handled herself with men to get what she wanted. She really used her mind. And that’s what I can relate to, in the male-dominated world of dance, where I always had the feeling that I had to prove myself.”

Lopez Ochoa can also relate to not being “traditionally” feminine. As a child, she dressed in her brothers’ clothes, and people often thought she was a boy. “The neighborhood kids were trying to feel my crotch to check,” she says. “So I was sent to ballet – because I didn’t act or look like a girl.” She says you can see in the pictures how her body has changed after two years of dancing. “My facial features, everything – I looked more feminine.” She raises her chin in a ballet position.

However, Lopez Ochoa did not lose her determination, and people did not stop asking her for change. She remembers being in ballet class as a 17-year-old, and saying out loud that the choreography was uncomfortable. “The teacher turned around and said, ‘You with your big mouth, you’re going to get in trouble.'” But Lopez Ochoa got into the choreography instead. “Nothing can really change you,” she says. “I’m still a tomboy. I don’t look like it. But your thought process remains the same.”

Over the past two decades, she has created more than 100 dances for companies around the world, including ballets inspired by the lives of Frida Kahlo, Coco Chanel and Eva Peron, so she knows how to paint portraits of strong, complex women. Regarding creating Lister through dance, López Ochoa says it was done step by step during the development of the work, rather than being predetermined. The dancers in the lead role (Gemma Coates, Amber Lewis, and Nida Aydinoglu) are women who “dare to take the space,” Lopez Ochoa says. “They were brave, and they weren’t afraid to be ‘ugly’ in classical ballet terms.”

In the same way that the real Lister wore men’s clothing, the dancer playing Lister will wear flats instead of Points shoes (except for the communion scene), meaning she can be more grounded when partnered with other women. Women can’t do the same big weightlifting exercises that men can, so they have to find other ways to create peak moments.

Romantic female pas de deux are a rarity in ballet, and López Ochoa aims to avoid clichés, including the acrobatic displays you often see in passionate duets. “It will be different, more curvy, more skewed,” she says. Do they accept? She says that not yet, there are movements to express love better, but perhaps after the “wedding” scene. Are the dancers great with her? “Yes, I thought they would be more conservative, but I came here last year for a workshop with them and they were like, ‘Let’s be saucy!’” she says.

The series has a passionate fan base. It has been life-changing for some women who have come to terms with – or come to terms with – their sexuality after hearing Lester’s story. Lopez Ochoa hopes the same applies to ballet, where there are many gay men, but, for example, a gay dancer Lopez Ochoa knows still feels she cannot be widely visible. “When I told her I was going to do Gentleman Jack’s ballet, she was screaming,” Lopez Ochoa says.