Pas de Q invades the classical ballet world to shake up and reinvent its choreographic forms and traditions. The queer ensemble of male and non-binary dancers combines drag with pointe dance, a practice of romantic ballet. The fairies, ghosts, fairy-tale figures and swans from the romantic ballet era are supposed to appear unreachable and weightless, as if floating. The pointe shoe is also a gender symbol, because only women danced on pointe.

In Pas de Q, the effortless fairies come from a distant future. The team, which consists entirely of professional drag artists on and behind the stage, allows their own life experiences and worlds of thought to flow into the performance. There they transfer their perspectives on sexuality, gender identity and romantic love into other galaxies: as science fiction goddesses they dance in a world detached from hierarchical and racist structures and common cultural gender norms. The result is a labyrinth of imaginative perversions beyond morality and shame that fans out the various possibilities of taking movement, dance and queer aesthetics – quite literally – on point.

TOMI PAASONEN was a ballet dancer with the Hamburg Ballet, San Francisco Lines Contemporary Ballet and Joffrey Ballet in Chicago until a serious accident ended his dancing career in 1997. In 1998, he founded the cross-disciplinary dance company Kunst-Stoff in San Francisco before moving to Berlin in 2002. From 2013 to 2018, he was artistic director of ITAK in Finland and curated several theater and two annual dance festivals. During his 30-year career as a choreographer and director, he has created nearly 70 pieces and projects with various artists, dancers, in different places and contexts around the world between 1991 and 2022.
paasonen.com

[Source: play bill]

TFB Nr. 1712