Rosie Kay: I resigned from my own dance company after I was accused of transphobia

There is Hope, performed by her dance company

“My lawyer advised me, ‘You are not going to win. They will find you guilty of transphobia, smear you — and that’s the end of your career.’ But I was just talking about women’s material reality and I am not going to go quietly. I am determined to put my head above the parapet.”

Kay was born in the Scottish borders to “a very non-verbal family”. Her businessman father and her mother, an academic, were mourning the death of an older child. “I danced to exist,” says Kay, whose husband is a theatre designer with whom she has a seven-year-old son. “From the beginning dance was about joy and pain. That’s the basis of my choreographic career.” She trained at London Contemporary Dance, then became a soloist at the Polish Dance Theatre, touring the world. Then, having escaped a violent, coercive relationship in France, she returned to Britain as a dancer in residence in Birmingham.

Ambitious to choreograph bigger works, in 2004 she formed her own company, chaired by her father. She’d lecture in dance three days a week so she could spend her remaining time in the studio.

In 2006, after a knee injury, doctors said she’d never dance again. Although this turned out to be pessimistic, Kay, who was 30 at the time, felt her career was over. But, when recovering from surgery, she dreamt that her leg had been blown off on a desert battlefield. She began thinking how soldiers use their bodies and whether she could encapsulate it in dance.

She approached the British Army and two years later found herself on Dartmoor, the only woman among 300 soldiers, carrying a 70lb backpack and on manoeuvres for four days and nights. She learnt to fire weapons, hung out with soldiers — talking about their lives — and played an insurgent in a military exercise against the Coldstream Guards. “I was commended for bravery,” she says.

Better even than the five-star newspaper reviews for her resultant ballet, 5 Soldiers, was the response from the military. Kay’s company performed at bases from Aldershot to Fort George. Squaddies were initially reluctant to attend a ballet, but then watched rapt. “They said I’d observed their fear, the machismo, what it’s like being trained to kill. All their private codes. Afterwards men who’d seen terrible things came up to me, saying, ‘This was like Afghanistan.’ A brigadier said, ‘This is a six-month tour in one hour.’ ”

From 2015 Kay’s career soared: 5 Soldiers and then an expanded work, 10 Soldiers, went on successful US tours; she created other ballets, including Fantasia and a solo autobiographical dance, Adult Female Dancer. Then, in 2018, at only a few weeks’ notice, she was asked to choreograph the Birmingham Commonwealth Games handover ceremony. It was watched worldwide by a billion people.

The Arts Council made the Rosie Kay Dance Company a “national portfolio organisation”, putting it on a permanent footing with an annual £150,000 grant. For tax reasons Kay decided to seek charitable status. This would mean she’d effectively lose control. “But that didn’t matter to me. I was very busy making many different works and I trusted the board.” Several members were longstanding friends.

Then, last summer, as lockdown ended, Kay began to create Romeo + Juliet for the Birmingham Hippodrome. Auditioning a young cast, aged 22-27, she found them troubled. “Covid had lowered their spirits. No one hung out together. They were very disjointed.” They were also inexperienced: several hadn’t even been able to hold their graduate shows. Even so, she felt they didn’t take well to direction from her or appreciate that she was putting them on a big stage.

The cast has three female and six male roles. One of the dancers in a male role and one in a female identified as non-binary, although they had auditioned for parts that accorded with their biological sex. Kay says she was happy to use “they” pronouns but “rehearsal is a quick, pressured environment — you need to be raw and instinctual”.

During one warm-up session she asked the male dancers to perform “boy jumps” and the females to do “girl jumps”, referring to specific classical ballet steps. At the coffee break she says the non-binary dancer who was cast in the female part complained that in doing this Kay had misgendered them. Kay says she apologised and said that ballet can be a gendered business, that she herself liked to “do the boy jumps because that fits better with my physicality”.

Feminism and sexual violence have always informed Kay’s work. At 16 she was raped by a school friend. “I said no, but he pushed me into sex. I told my mother but she said it wasn’t worth telling the police.” She says she is gender non-conforming, “but as a dancer you live in your body. You are under no illusion about your sex. During periods you injure more easily. When you ovulate you’re wobbly.”

In August, halfway through rehearsals, Kay arranged a party. The plan was to bond, relax and cheer everyone up after a difficult year (Kay’s father had recently died). She made lentil dishes, salads and grilled salmon to cater for the young dancers’ vegan and gluten-free diets. When they arrived they excitedly asked for a guided tour of Kay’s house.

The evening passed well at first. But booze flowed, everyone got “lairy and loud”. This is when Kay told them how she was working with an LGBT book club and several trans friends to create Orlando. She explained the plot (none had read the book). Then talk turned more broadly to the difference between sex and gender.

Kay asked them to define non-binary. At that she says several male dancers shouted that she was a bigot and a terf. Kay said that she supported single-sex spaces, especially because in 2019 in a dance studio’s gender-neutral changing rooms she saw “women and girls getting undressed and in the middle a young man dancing about with his penis out. I was too shocked to complain.”

The party ended in the early hours. On Monday, at rehearsals, Kay says she felt “a wall of animosity. And the show was in a week and a half. I wondered, what are we going to do?” Kay asked her chair of trustees to talk to them. “She said: ‘This is very serious. I’m getting them to write statements.’ ” Four dancers — the two non-binary dancers, one woman and one man — complained. The complaints, which Kay says she was not shown for six weeks, alleged that she was aggressive and had made them feel “uncomfortable” by showing them her child’s bedroom. “They claimed I’d said being non-binary is ‘insane’. When I was saying there is no such sex as non-binary.” Without even speaking to her, trustees cancelled Orlando.

After a board meeting Kay agreed to apologise to the dancers and undergo future “gender training”. After Romeo + Juliet’s successful first night the company broke up for four weeks before the bigger shows with a full orchestra in a double bill with the Birmingham Royal Ballet directed by Carlos Acosta. Kay was so upset by the investigation she saw a psychiatrist who signed her off with stress.

When the company reconvened, the non-binary dancer in the female part had quit (an older dancer had to learn the part in two days) and had filed a further complaint about the party, saying Kay’s use of the words “penis” and “vagina” amounted to sexual harassment. Kay was so upset she collapsed. An Instagram post by the dancer still says: “Cannot wait to be back in the studio with [X] and the rest of the Rosie Kay Dance Company.”

The board of trustees wrote to the Arts Council and the Charity Commission telling them that Kay was under investigation for transphobia. It hired a lawyer and demanded that Kay be investigated by an external HR consultant. “But I refuse to submit to an investigation which does not acknowledge my gender-critical beliefs are protected under law.”

Now Kay finds herself locked out from her own company, estranged from her very name and suing her board for constructive dismissal. “All the money in the account was made by my ideas and work,” she says. Thankfully, her canny father ensured that she retains all intellectual property rights. So the Rosie Kay Dance Company is left a shell.

“They could hire another choreographer but it won’t be a Rosie Kay show, and I don’t want the public deceived.” She is angry not with the young dancers but the “cowards” on her board. Feminists inside the Arts Council have said privately that they will back her new venture when she’s ready. “My body is my trade,” Kay says. “To deny that is to deny the basis of my art. That is proper cancellation. This is profound.”

A spokesman for the board of trustees said: “Details of any employment matters at Rosie Kay Dance Company are confidential, and it is therefore inappropriate to comment beyond saying that we strongly resist this interpretation of events.”