Do contemporary ballet and gay country music make strange bedfellows? Not to Robert Dekkers.
Three years ago, Dekkers, founder and artistic director of San Francisco’s Post:Ballet dance company, caught singer-songwriter Patrick Haggerty and his band Lavender Country, whose self-titled 1973 recording is credited as the first gay-themed country music album in history. The music made a deep impression on Dekkers, he says. “The next day I emailed Patrick to ask if I could turn it into a ballet.”
Despite never having seen a ballet Haggerty said yes.
“Hardly anyone gets an opportunity like that, especially with gay country music,” says Haggerty. “In 1973, the fact that it was gay country music meant that it was completely outrageous. It had no monetary value and that opened a door for us to bare our souls with the raw emotional truth.”
When the musician went backstage after the ballet’s first performance to thank the dancers, he recalls, “They were in a huddle together and there were tears. OK, I said, what’s going on? One dancer looked at me and said, ‘Don’t you realize that all of us want to dance something we actually believe in? That a lot of us work a whole lifetime and never get an opportunity to dance the truth? We all are able to use our art to perform the truth the way we feel it.’ And I had just given them that chance.”
The critically acclaimed work, directed by Dekkers, combines Haggerty’s music and storytelling with the innovative choreography of Vanessa Thiessen in poignant work focused on queer relationships and human narratives. It’s getting reprised this weekend at San Francisco’s Z Space performance venue.
Details: 8 p.m. April 25-27; $40-50; www.zspace.org, www.postballet.org.
— Aimée Ts’ao, Correspondent
