“We are born naked, the rest is drag.” – RuPaul Charles
“People who haven’t lived their whole lives as women… shouldn’t get to define us,” asserts Elinor Burkett in The New York Times, in an exasperated reaction to Caitlyn Jenner’s heavily orchestrated arrival on the planet: one of the greatest male athletes of all time squeezed, Old Hollywood-style, into a corset, looking like a million dollars on the cover of Vanity Fair.
Matthew Poppe (Photo: Matthew Brown)
And yet, provocateurs of gendered transgression have often illuminated our blind spots.
For centuries, female impersonators – variously straight, gay and transgender – have employed their ephemeral art to remind us that we are all, at some level, performing gender.
Over the past 40 years, the formidable all-male Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo have performed the classics with astonishing fidelity, gleefully subverting the ideals of the art form while paying homage to it. Their mind-blowing mastery of pointework and of the fine points of ballerina style from different eras often make audiences forget that these are all men onstage. At other times, their artful exaggerations and their irreverent, self-sabotaging humor remind us of the fine line between high art and trash, between the sublime and the ridiculous. A glimpse of a ballerina’s hairy underarms, feathers moulting from a swan tutu, a grand battement that goes rogue and knocks a partner on his fanny, attention-seeking curtseys, little acts of passive aggression between feuding ballerinas – all momentarily peel back the curtain on the elaborate, centuries-old illusion that is ballet.
Ballet to the People recently stalked one of her favorite new Trocks, 23-year-old Matthew Poppe, who, in the time-honored tradition of the company, adopts a vaguely Russian, punning stage name, complete with manufactured bio larded with pretentious academic dancespeak. Poppe calls himself Doris Vidanya when he dances ballerina roles, and Ilya Bobovnikov when he dances male roles. (So far, his performances have been split about evenly between the two.) Catching his breath between the company’s tours to Spain and Italy, the engaging Poppe graciously made time for an intimate chat.
Matthew Poppe
– Read about Matthew and ogle more fabulous photos in our interview on the Huffington Post. –
