Dancers have a point to make as SA International Ballet Competition goes virtual

As the world adjusts to life in an online space, the arts, too, are moving onto a virtual stage. This year's South African International Ballet Competition (SAIBC), which was supposed to happen from July 13 to 18 at the Artscape Opera House in Cape Town, will be taking place virtually.

Hosting the SAIBC online via an app means the competition's scope and reach has been broadened to connect dancers, teachers and ballet enthusiasts from around the world who otherwise might not have made it to the event.

In keeping up with firsts, this year the competition will also be hosting a series of online panel discussions. Sophie Rebecca, a transgender ballet dancer from the UK who's helped the Royal Academy of Dance in the UK to develop its policies to include trans and gender non-conforming people, will participate in the Ballet Diplomacy panel discussion scheduled to take place on Thursday.

Sophie uses ballet as a platform to advance understanding of the experiences transgender people face and to promote acceptance. "I've been very lucky to be able to perform internationally. I also get to talk at diplomacy conferences about my journey, about acceptance and about things about our world that we need to change," she says.

Sophie started ballet as an adult in 2014 after what she describes as a non-traditional journey to becoming a ballet dancer. She fell in love with ballet when she was four or five but struggled in her journey to becoming a ballerina because she was told that boys aren't ballerinas.

"That's one of my earliest memories of what's called gender dysphoria - my perceived gender didn't align with who I am as a person. It would take me many years to make sense of all this," Sophie says.

"It took me 26 years to fully understand this journey. Meanwhile, my love for dancing was always burning in the background but I was never able to find a place where I could dance and be my true self. Ballet was somewhere else I could be where I wasn't forced to be the gender I'm not."

One of Sophie's biggest obstacles to becoming a ballet dancer was finding a teacher willing to teach her the female variations in ballet.

Sophie will be joined on stage by Román Baca, the artistic director and co-founder of EXIT12 Dance Company in New York. As a military veteran and classically trained ballet dancer, Baca has been using dance to tell veterans' stories to educate audiences about the realities of war and heal divisions in society.

After serving in the marines for eight years and serving in the Iraq war in 2005 in Fallujah as a machine gunner doing combat patrols, he says he was exposed to a side of the world and humanity that changed his perspective.

"When I left the Marine Corps in 2008 I felt a little lost in direction and had a lack of purpose. I was also exhibiting a few of the qualities of post-war service, including anxiety, depression, anger and violence. It took my wife to spur me in the direction of rediscovering art."

What started as a project to help him move forward in his life turned into a dance project that made it possible to talk about war in a different way by presenting difficult conversations to audiences in an artistic way where they could connect and empathise with the content.

In 2017 he had the opportunity to go back to Iraq as a dance teacher. There he worked with young people, teaching them how to choreograph dance about their lives and the impact war had on them.

"The common message they wanted to communicate through their choreography was that they were just like the the rest of us. That they want to live their lives, do things they're passionate about and find someone to fall in love with. They want to do that without the fear of violence and war.

"We created a piece of dance that told exactly those stories and we continued to perform that dance work to combat Islamaphobia and offer the human side of the nationalities that some people have a negative connotation about."

Baca started dance workshops with military veterans with the same idea - to talk about the things they weren't able to discuss and to communicate this through art. He says he wanted his work to spur action and conversation. Today his work lies in creating diplomatic conversations that promote peace.

Baca says opportunities like the one created by the SAIBC are incredible places to have conversations. "It's an opportunity to not only talk about these issues but also to talk about the people who are going to be leading the world in a few years."

• Sophie Rebecca and Román Baca will participate in the SAIBC's "Ballet Diplomacy" panel discussion on Thursday July 16 at 3pm. Free access to all daily discussions that take place live on SAIBC's Facebook page. To watch the ballet competition, ballet classes and Gala performance from July 13-18, download the ArtOfLife app, available free at Google Play Store. iOS users should click here to watch.