She has based ballets on Frida Kahlo, Coco Chanel and Eva Perón. So Annabelle Lopez Ochao was well placed to take on the passionate, complicated figure of Anne Lister
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couple dance across the studio, their movements formal, the mood resigned. The man pulls his partner towards him but she spins away, landing face to face with another woman. Now the two women dance and everything is different: bright and playful as their eyes meet. It ends in a clinch behind a bookcase. The great love is not between the woman, Mariana, and her husband, but between Mariana and Anne Lister, also known as Gentleman Jack.
I’m watching this play out in a rehearsal room at Northern Ballet in Leeds, where choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa is in the midst of creating a ballet version of Gentleman Jack, as popularised in Sally Wainwright’s hit TV series (Wainwright is a consultant on the ballet). Lister was a 19th-century landowner running her family’s estate in Halifax, but is better known for the diaries that revealed her passionate lesbian love affairs and for boldly living an unconventional life for the times.
Lopez Ochoa, who is Belgian-Colombian and lives in Amsterdam, had never heard of Lister when the ballet was proposed to her, but after binge-watching the series she said yes. “The woman, I mean, she’s a force!” says Lopez Ochoa. “She is audacious. She is in her power. She’s unafraid, inspiring. There is a little bit of edge to her. She’s not very kind, she’s not a hero – but that’s what makes her interesting.”
