Katy Pyle, Artistic Director of Ballez: Ballet for the Queer Body.
IPA and NYU Tisch Dance Present:
Community Forum: Come Together
Katy Pyle, Artistic Director of Ballez: Ballet for the Queer Body
Katy Pyle is a lesbian choreographer, dancer and educator whose works explore her own conflicted relationship with the form of ballet.
Graduating from Hollins University with a BA in Multimedia Performance Art in 2002, and from the High School Conservatory program at the North Carolina School of the Arts in 1999, formerly a child actor, Pyle has been performing professionally since age 5 and has lived in New York City since 2002.
She has co-created and performed internationally in works by Ivy Baldwin, Faye Driscoll, John Jasperse, Xavier Le Roy, Jennifer Monson, Anna Sperber, Katie Workum, and Young Jean Lee, among others. She created multimedia rock operetta duet performances with Eleanor Hullihan as asubtout from 2003-2009. In 2010, Pyle presented her fully produced full-length work as a lead artist at Danspace Project at St. Marks Church.
A 2013-2015 Artist in Residence at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), Pyle has also been granted residencies through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Mount Tremper Arts, Rockbridge Artist’s Exchange, the Dragon’s Egg, Abrons Arts Center, and La Mama.
Ballez was established by Pyle in 2011 and inserts 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’ (Danspace Project, 2013), ‘Variations on Virtuosity, a Gala with the Stars of the Ballez’ (American Realness, Abrons Arts Center, 2015) and ‘Sleeping Beauty & the Beast’ (La Mama, 2016). Pyle recently choreographed ‘Slavic Goddesses’, at the Kitchen in early 2017, which featured solos for Ballez dancers, as a collaborative project with artist Paulina Olowska.
