Insistence: A Butch Ballet public workshop

A public dance workshop for anyone who identifies with butchness to come and move together, as part of Bishop May Down and Emma Lewis-Jones’ new project Insistence: A Butch Ballet. 

Performance experience is not necessary, ballet experience is not desired.

Attendance is free but should be booked in advance - before registering your attendance via the google form link, please read through the FAQs further down this page, composed and answered by Bishop and Emma.

This event is part of Bishop May Down and Emma Lewis-Jones' Take Me Somewhere x Tramway 2026 Graduate Residencies, a collaborative programme promoting radical performance. MORE

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FAQs

Who can sign up?
Anyone who identifies with butchness. We specifically encourage fat, disabled, POC,
lesbian and trans people to attend.

Who are you?
We are Bishop May Down (they/them) and Emma Lewis-Jones (she/her), two butch artists working across performance, choreography, and facilitation. We feel passionate that our work empowers and represents butches of all races, genders, classes, accessibility needs, and life experiences.

What will happen in the workshop? Will I be asked to speak about my personal experiences?
Emma and Bishop will lead the workshop using movement prompts to explore unison (doing the same action at the same time) in a large group. We know that bodies can never truly do any dance ‘the same’ way and celebrating this perceived failure is the crux of our project.

We will then move to a short discussion, where you will not be asked to talk about your own personal life experiences. Rather, the goal of this is for us to get feedback on our facilitation.

We might ask questions about accessibility, how you felt as a participant, your experience of the choreographic prompts, and how it felt to work in the group.

You don’t need to do or talk about anything you don’t feel comfortable with, and we won’t push you.

Is the Google Form a review process? Is there a chance I won’t be invited to the workshop if I complete the google form?
We are asking you to complete a Google Form so that we know who is attending and can give this information to Tramway, as it’s a closed workshop. It’s also so that we can know about everyone’s access needs in advance, and make sure that the space is safe and comfortable to explore our shared experience of butch identity/embodiment. If you have told us that you identify with butchness, you will be invited to the workshop. You will receive the invitation via email in advance of the workshop day.

What is the project?
Insistence: A Butch Ballet is a new socially-engaged ensemble dance project being developed by Bishop May Down and Emma Lewis-Jones. We are exploring the representation of butch identity and experience through the queering and de centring of unison and canon as foundational yet flawed dance modalities.

This is our first stage of R&D, and your participation in the workshop helps us develop our choreography and the way we facilitate the project.

Image: Emma Lewis-Jones and Bishop May Down. Photo by Chaoying Rao.