Ballet dancer forced out for making gay porn videos

A ballet dancer with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School is claiming that he has been unfairly dismissed because he acts in pornographic videos.

22-year-old Jeppe Hansen from Denmark, joined the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School in September 2012.

In an interview with CBC News he said,

My identity is built on being a ballet dancer, for me to come there was a big opportunity.

However, under the name of Jett Black, he started filming his first gay videos earlier this year, (“to express myself in a new way”), and the school directors subsequently asked him to sign a letter that he was voluntarily withdrawing from the school.

Hansen said he hadn’t wanted to leave RWB:

You cannot be in a company or with the school or whatever because you’ve decided to take a different standpoint artistically — not because you physically can’t do it, or because you’re not good enough.

Being told because you’re doing something else that’s interrupting with what we think you can do is really difficult because they know it’s your passion, they know that that’s what you live off. They know my entire identity’s built on it. So it was really difficult to be told that and to be told, ‘You know what? There’s no space for you here.

There is no denying his passion for dance. His Twitter account shows retweets of David Hallberg, the English National Ballet, and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet itself; he even follows gramilano! One tweet accompanying a photo of him dressed for a Nutcracker with the company says: “#Nutcracker countdown. Secret love! Shhh…”. Looking at that photo, and thinking of him being filmed making hardcore pornography is rather like thinking of one’s parents having sex, the clothed and unclothed images don’t fit easily together. But that’s not his problem.

The Royal Winnipeg Ballet have denied to comment due to privacy concerns. However, in the school’s code of conduct, it is written:

“Please note that RWB School Professional Division students are not permitted to perform outside of the RWB School without permission from the RWB School Director. Any student wishing to participate in any additional dance program during RWB School breaks must also receive approval from the RWB School Director in advance.”

I don’t think that the ‘performing’ Hansen was doing is the sort of extracurricular activity that this policy covers.

Hansen said that he had already been asked to consider entering the adult film business when he lived in Montreal, but he had refused. However, earlier this year he changed his mind,

It was more important for me to be me and to do the things I wanted to do for once, and not what everyone else wanted. Being a ballet dancer is restrictive. Everyone tells you what you have to do, how to look, what to weigh, how to perform [and] be the artist you are.

To me no one can tell me what art is. Art is what you and I define art by.

As American pornographer Larry Flynt’s lawyer, Louis Sirkin, remarked in the 70s:

One man’s obscenity is another man’s art.