Now 46 years old, the British choreographer Rosie Kay founded the Rosie Kay Dance Company in 2004 and, to quote the BBC, “has been making challenging, socially committed and political work for decades.” She’s the kind of artist, in other words, that the left-wing media love to celebrate. In August 2020, for example, when she premiered 5 Soldiers – for which she’d prepared by embedding herself in an infantry battalion – the Guardian reviewer summed up his verdict as follows: “The life of a soldier is already full of choreography, and Kay works with that to make dance that feels rooted in reality.” In May 2021, the Guardian’s critic described her dance piece Adult Female Dancer, about “a woman’s struggle to define herself, inside and out,” as “superb.” And in September 2021, her Romeo + Juliet was praised by not one but two Guardian writers, both of whom used the word “brilliant.”
Then, quite suddenly, Kay’s star fell. On the evening of August 28 of last year, she held a dinner party at her home for the Romeo + Juliet troupe, which skewed very young. It began well enough. The wine, by all accounts, flowed. But when Kay was asked about her next project, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, the conversation entered what is, in high-culture circles in the year 2022, exceedingly dangerous territory. Since Orlando is about a man who changes sex mysteriously, it was no surprise that mention of it led to a discussion of gender. Two of Kay’s dancers, as it happened, identify as “non-binary.” She asked them about that.
“Initially,” one of the dancers later told the BBC, “I was OK with her asking about why we identify as non-binary. It’s OK to be a bit curious. But her repeated questioning stepped into micro-aggression territory, then into something more potent. If you’ve seen as many YouTube videos by self-identified transgender people as I have, you know that asking questions about their pronouns and the like is more than welcome until, suddenly, it isn’t. There’s a fine line between the unearned attention that they live for and the “microaggressions” they claim to experience when they’re given even the slightest bit of pushback. “She was asking us,” the dancer continued, “to justify our existence, asking people to confirm their genitalia, as if that was evidence of who somebody is.” Note that last bit: in a society that’s been captured by transgender ideology, it’s offensive to suggest that a person’s sexual identity can be identified by taking a look at his or her genitalia.
Kay’s own version of what happened that evening is this: after she mentioned Orlando, one of her guests maintained that the lead role could only be played by a transgender dancer. This, of course, is the new orthodoxy. In 1993, Tom Hanks played a gay lawyer in Philadelphia; in 1999, Hilary Swank played a trans male in Boys Don’t Cry; in 2008, Sean Penn played a gay activist in Milk. All three won Oscars, at least partly because they were considered brave to have crossed that gender line. In 2022, however, the PC view of such casting is that it isn’t courageous but contemptible: how dare a straight actor take such a role?
After her dinner party, Kay assumed the tensions would “blow over.” Au contraire. One dancer quit. Six dancers filed a complaint with the dance company’s board. One of them, Iona McGuire, who is “non-binary,” has been described as being “at the centre of the row.” “We weren’t striving to cancel Rosie,” McGuire later insisted. “I was hoping for acknowledgement of her blatant transphobia and an apology for her constant refusal to use my correct pronouns.” Kay denied that she’d dismissed McGuire’s chosen pronouns – even though she should have felt entirely free to do so. As for being “transphobic,” it’s not enough these days to live and let live; if you aren’t willing to admit that, say, a person can actually be “non-binary,” you’re a transphobe.
The dancers’ complaint triggered an “internal grievance process.” Kay was exonerated. She apologized for having caused offense and “stressed the importance of respecting different viewpoints.” But she declined to knuckle under to totalitarian ideology, leading the dancers to conclude, as one of them put it, that she hadn’t truly owned “the fact that she made transphobic remarks.” In other words, it wasn’t enough for Kay to be sorry for hurting their feelings: she was expected to do nothing less than embrace in its entirety an aggressive totalitarian fiction that considers the statement of objective biological facts as an expression of bigotry. So some of the dancers appealed to the board. Another investigation ensued, this one by “an external HR company.” Deciding she’d had enough, Kay resigned on December 7 of last year. Emotionally battered and robbed of the business that still bears her name, she licked her wounds, recovered, started a new dance company called K2C0, and eventually went public with her story. Whereupon the dancers complained about that: by telling the media about their effort to bring down her career, they charged, Kay was endangering their careers.
Such is the mentality of today’s spoiled young wokesters. It’s not just that they expect you to march in lockstep with them – as evidenced by the brats at various publishing houses who’ve kicked up fusses (in some cases successfully) over their bosses’ plans to put out books by intellectual and cultural titans of our age like Woody Allen and Jordan Peterson – monumental figures whom these entry-level nullities are dumb enough to disdain. To such young people, raised in privilege by indulgent parents who eschewed discipline and “educated” by teachers and professors who were more interested in inculcating knee-jerk leftist attitudes than in shaping rigorously analytical young minds, the idea of having a boss, and obeying his or her orders, is utterly alien. Kay expected that her dancers would be grateful to her for throwing them a nice dinner. But their sort expects no less. Consider Eric Frohnhoefer, the numbskull Twitter engineer who tweeted disrespectfully on November 14 about his new boss, Elon Musk, only to be surprised when Musk fired him (in a tweet, of course). Then there’s the recent outrage over Musk’s decision to ban free lunches – estimated cost: $400 per meal – for Twitter employees.
As Claire Allfree noted in The Telegraph, one of the many ironies of this tale is that Kay, who “has experienced serious sexual assault and nearly died while giving birth to her son,” has made a point of “explor[ing] perceptions of gender in her dance.” 5 Soldiers “challenged gender stereotypes within the army” and Adult Female Dancer pondered misogyny. But none of this is enough for the woke mob. In one of her podcast interviews, Kay discussed the fact that dance is by definition preoccupied with the body, and with performance; but she insisted that the place for performance is on the stage or screen, and that the rules of real life cannot be altered in order to embrace the essentially performative phenomenon of men pretending to be women.
Bravissima. How is it, you may wonder, that a woman who in many ways is obviously a standard-issue member of the British cultural elite refused to bow to the gender police? The answer lies in her family history. As she told Allfree last August, and explained to Laurence Fox in a YouTube video posted last month, Kay is the granddaughter of Polish refugees. As a child, she heard from them about the intellectual tyranny they’d experienced under the Stasi. Shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Kay herself lived and worked for a while in her ancestral country, where Communism had ended but freedom had yet to fully establish itself. “You speak too much,” she was told by anxious colleagues. “You speak too loudly.” It was unsettling; she was happy to return home. But now, she says, the atmosphere in Britain – and of course this applies to much of the West as well – is eerily reminiscent of her Polish interlude. Meanwhile, of course, the Poles, who for obvious reasons recognize despotism when they see it, have made clear their total unwillingness to compromise their post-Soviet freedoms in the spurious name of “tolerating” transgenderism. Funny, isn’t it, how these things work?
Thanks Bruce, excellent coverage.
She apologized for having caused offense and “stressed the importance of respecting different viewpoints.”
That was her mistake, never apologise to the woke mob they will not accept your apology gracefully, they will use it to attack you further.
Hear, hear! 🍻
That was sage advice.
Leftists never seek apologies; they only use apologies to seek our destruction.
Leftists have ZERO respect and ZERO tolerance for viewpoints that differ from theirs, yet they demand respect if we don’t agree with theirs. Correction: they not only demand respect, they demand that we align with their crazy ideologies.
Exactly. If you don’t accept, embrace and promote their “whatever” you are not sincere. Only a full conversion will get them of your back.
Absolutely!!!
I can’t understand why she did. And for her to resign from the company she founded was, to my mind, a huge mistake.
I get that she must have been under so much pressure it must have seemed the better option, but it’s not something I would have done. I would have doubled down, and done my best to destroy the little woketards. It’s a matter of principle.
I’m obviously a more horrible person than she is.
I wish her well in the future.
Why call yourself ‘horrible’ for standing up to woke lunacy.? Does that not put you also in the ‘apologist basket?
Apology is what keeps this idiocy going.
I’d refer your readers to Spiked, magazine Brendan’s interview, where she underlies her concerns for women’s rights, the misogyny of transgender activists appropriating women’s spaces.
These performers are undermining their own pursuit of realising roles and inclusion in future works that dance companies such as Kay’s create.
Artists such as Kay definitely won’t be employing such spoiled narcissists.
Fortunately only the most talented will go on to be part of great works
Yeah, never apologize to a leftist or a troll. I think a lot about what strategy and tactics to use against them. I rely heavily on not reacting to them, and avoiding them.
Oh, yes. If anything, the best thing she could have done is told them to F off and kick the ingrates out of her house. Young people need to be shocked with vicious correction.
She was wrong and weak to quit. Better if she just kicked all of those mentally ill, narcissistic manipulative dancers out of her company and tried to publicize their moron-ness at the time. It isn’t all young people that are pathetic as they are and the more they are dunked, the faster we can get rid of their effete and slanderous behavior. Honestly– no one but their parents to blame!
Ah but if labour laws are similar there, she would have been sued for “wrongful dismissal” and “discriminating” on the base of sexuality. It’s the sacred cow these days. They might have even forced her to close her business. It’s so insane that Christian colleges are being sued these days for… being Christian.
I will say, a lot of them are ruined in school or the colleges. I know parents who are furious their children have become woke.
Binary vs non Binary is a Binary situation, if you claim to be ” non binary” you are factually Binary. 0 or 1. People who favor mutilating children are also bad at other things.
Interesting take… binaryvs non-binary IS binary.
BOOM!!! These clowns are thus guilty of the very thing of which they accuse you.
Brilliant. I will put that into my non-binary ammunition feeding device and use when appropriate.
It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is – Bill Clinton
“These clowns are thus guilty of the very thing of which they accuse you.”
They usually are.
That’s clever. Binary arithmetic, binary logic. I have to think about that.
Trans are a blasphemy against the body.. Bodies exist beyond mannerisms and fashion and are of course more than skin deep. Sex and gender exist at the cellular level. Gender is in our hormones and pheromones as bodies precede even consciousness. Our bodies understand men from women at a deeper level that mind or culture.
The body does not lie.
Transsexualism is a deep hatred of the body itself. And there is no identity without the body. It is all pretence and lies and propaganda at that point, which no true artist would ever tolerate. Propaganda is anathema to art, and in the art of dance, the body is truth.
Yep. This whole gender lying phenomenon is nothing less than mere man deciding “I will arise, I will be like God”. Can the made become the non-made?
To quote from a well known and loved film:
“eeeeeem POSS ee bulllllll”
That should be the motto for the Dem party and their leftist adherents. When the one true God has been forsaken something has to fill the void. History tells us the most likely candidate is a tyrant using brute strength to enforce compliance.
Is it me or am I the only one who can’t stand the word gender ? A word I only heard in English classes in junior high school. I’m old and ready to move to a far off galaxy. I can’t take this garbage anymore.
You are not alone, the woke militia use the word gender because they KNOW there are ONLY two sexes, male and female.
gender is applied to words in languages where nouns fall into two or three “classes” for the purpos of endings and modifiers that must “agree” gender-wise with th subject. It took a bit tog grasp how, in latin, the noun “ship” had a feminine gender Thus, in a sentence, when you find modifiers likme strng, fast, beautiful, old, ending in the letter “a” you kniw that modifier refers to the word “ship” and not to something else. All languages derived fro, latin are built that way. I think greek does the same, but there are greek roots in latin. Don’t know about russian chnese hindu, et.c.
But ships do not have genitalia, so gender is not ideitical to sex. Sex IS, on nearly all more “complicated” organisms, binary. Yes there are exceptions, but humans are not amongst those exceptions. Nearly universallym all humans ARE binary… each onduvidual has either two X chromosomes or one X and one Y. A vanishingly small part of the population have XYY or XXY. But even those will universally demonstrate binary expression. Yu will NEVER find a himan with both ovaries AND testicles. Nor breasts providing milk along with a penis.
Sorry (NOT!!!) wokies, you ARE either one sex ir th other ni matter what you do to mutilate resonctrust, remove, the body parts you do not like.
When confronted by someone claimng to be what they are not, there is ONE question that should be put to them: WHO appointed YOU as God? And now PROVE that appointmemt.
The left is far too refined to use a plain old Anglo-Saxon word like “sex” so they use “gender” instead, and use it incorrectly. English is one of the few Indo-European languages that has three grammatical genders but most have only two. I recently read about some fighting over using the “correct pronouns” for a female impersonator (there are no trans people in my opinion, only grotesque simulacra) in German.
As to moving to a far-off galaxy, I’m old too and am glad of it. Be patient; we aren’t too much longer for this world and can look forward to a better one, where truth is obvious.
This is why God limits our time on earth. Satan is the ruler of this earth.
It’s typical leftist manipulation of the language. It becomes more effective as more dullards are cultivated in our education system.
This all boils down to individuality and the belief in the individual(soul). Being a true individual makes you a minority of one, and though many pursue this reality few can muster the strength to actually BE an individual and stand alone in spite of prevailing wisdom. Human nature drives us to be part of a group and the soul drives us to overcome our baser nature. Yin and Yang, all things in balance, in the individual despite the universe.
Thank you Ms. Kay for your courage in standing up too these mini-tyrants. As a former performer many people in the arts are unusually body/mind conscience.Combine this with an extraordinary need for attention. It is not surprising to me that so many of them have sadly, adopted these crazy gender theories. That is what it is. Wishing you were another sex, does not make you another sex!
I would encourage everyone reading this to support Ms Kay in every way possible so she can continue on despite these intolerant fools.
There is no such thing called “gender”. It’s a made up fantasy word used to justify the behaviors of perverts. There is sex, male and female. .
There’s gender, and it’s grammatical. “Sex” is the correct word for members of biological species, but it is too crude a word for refined modern sensibilities.
There is no such thing called gender. It’s a made up word used to justify the behavior of perverts. There is sex, male and female.
A MINOR ERROR: The Stasi were the internal security apparatus of the now-defunct German Democratic Republic,
not that of the now-defunct Polish People’s Republic.
Ms. Kay should sue the board of her former dance company, which only she could have started and run and which appropriately bore her name, to change its name. They are engaging in trademark infringement even if she did not actually register her name as a trademark. And good luck to those righteous turkeys trying to replicate her success.
Great article, typical leftist pap and manipulation of language.
What I really wanted to ask–not to be pedantic–but:
“Musk’s decision to ban free lunches – estimated cost: $400 per meal”
$400 per meal? Is that a typo? How is that even possible?
I wondered about that, too. A guess; the kitchen buys/prepares enough food to feed the estimated number of employees that “might” eat there in a day. To make the math easy, let’s say they buy $4000 worth of food to feed 400 people but only 10 people eat. That drives the cost to Twitter from $10 a meal to $400 a meal. That’s the best I could come up with.
Now you know why sexual morality laws were put in place. When anything goes, this is the kind of crap that happens. Why, even adultery was against the law at one time.
When nations ignore God’s law as handed down to Moses, chaos ensues. In Genesis, there is the account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. This was brought on by God HIMSELF because of militant hom o sex uality and gross debauchery that was rife in those cities. We’re not too far from it today. I’m glad I don’t have much longer to live. Who wants to live in a culture where woke thugs and sexual deviants rule the day.
It is a century-old work of fiction. Everything she needed to know was in the work itself. Her error was thinking that the opinions of real human beings today could illuminate what was in the imaginary characters of an authoress long dead.
In my humble opinion Ms Kay should have fired the lot of them, closed down for a Season, restarted again and made it known SHE was the Boss and if anybody disagreed with what SHE wanted in HER Company then she can show them the door..
To apologize was her big mistake as it only gives these nutters more power…
There are only two sexes, you can change your genitalia but not your chromosomes… Reality check…. Go figure…
Simple common sense does not appear to be too common these days.