Thankfully, I don’t need to travel to London to experience this performance as it’s being live streamed. (For information about the show’s live stream and watch-on-demand tickets, click here.)
Following is “A Note from Kadeem” as published in the show’s programme booklet.
All the World’s A Stage is, at heart, a celebration of the many people a performer becomes in the pursuit of their craft.
Performing artists invest years of their lives learning how to transform into characters, stories, emotions and ideas. We train our bodies to communicate things that words cannot always express, often presenting the finished result as though it came effortlessly. Behind every moment onstage, however, is an enormous amount of work, vulnerability, repetition and courage.
Although this show contains more than dance, dance is its central pillar, so I want to take a moment to discuss something that has shaped both my relationship with the art form and the work I create.
Because dance is something that is watched, a dancer’s body can quickly become something that other people feel entitled to assess. Our bodies are discussed, compared, corrected and judged. We are told what shape we should be, how we should move and what we should wear. Over time, the body can begin to feel less like the home of the artist within us and more like the property of the audience (in the theatre or even more difficult to handle – online), the institution or the tradition.
I believe this has turned many people away from dance, particularly ballet, before they have never had the opportunity to discover what it might mean to them. When you spend so much time looking into a mirror, it can become difficult not to view yourself through the imagined eyes of everyone else.
Those experiences reach beyond body shape. Ballet has long carried strict ideas about gender: boys perform the large jumps, girls dance en pointe; boys lift, girls are lifted; tutus belong to one kind of body. Race, class and access create further barriers. For many people who are not white, wealthy or able to follow a traditional path through professional training, ballet can appear to be a world in which they were never meant to belong.
As a gay Black man from Trinidad and Tobago, dancing in pointe shoes and tutus in public places, I found freedom in going against what people expected ballet – and a ballet dancer – to look like. My work began as a way of creating space for myself within an art form I have loved for most of my life.
Over time, that personal act of freedom became something larger. It became a way of showing that ballet can be more than what we have been taught to expect.
I have never followed the traditional professional route. I dance because I love it. That does not make the joy, discipline or passion I find in ballet any less real.
Although ballet sits at the center of my journey, this programme aims to show much more than that. Every performer you see tonight has brought something of themselves to this work: their experiences, their imagination and their relationship with the stage. [NOTE: Along with Kadeem, others in All the World’s a Stage include dance artists Mercedes Prevatt and Rebecca Chan, singer and musical theatre performer Eve Shanu-Wilson, creatives Mandy Izquierdo, Two Thunder, and Storrveldi, performer Xavier Thomas, and choreographic duo Bloom Collective.]
I hope you will see more than technique or physical appearance. I hope you will see people following what makes them feel alive.
Whether you are here in the theatre or watching from somewhere across the world, perhaps something tonight will encourage you to begin (or return to) something you love.
Finally, a million thank yous to every one of you for supporting my work. By being here, whether in person or online, you are helping me to continue growing my mission of bringing ballet to more people.
Thank you for sharing this evening with us.
Related Off-site Links:
Kadeem’s Official Website
“Being a Ballet Dancer Is Years of Hard Work, But It’s All Worth It” Says Kadeem En Pointe – Stuart Norval (France 24, February 26, 2026).
Men en Pointe: Ballet Dancers Kick Against Gender Stereotypes – Matilda Martin (The Guardian, March 10, 2021).
See also the following dance-related Wild Reed posts:
• Kadeem
• A Message in Dance That Challenges, Inspires and Liberates
• The Soul of a Dancer
• The Trouble with the Male Dancer – Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
• The Premise of All Forms of Dance
• The Art of Dancing as the Supreme Symbol of the Spiritual Life
• The Power of Dance
• “Then I Shall Leap Into Love”
• Love’s the Only Dance
• We All Dance
• Not Whether We Dance, But How
• The Dance of Life
• And As We Dance . . .
• Our Dance
• “I Came Alive With Hope”
• Finding Balance in the Presence of the Beloved
• Our Bodies Are Part of the Cosmos
• Flexibility and Flow
• Move Us, Loving God
• A Prayer for Dancers
• Trusting the Flow
• Aristotle Papanikolaou on How Being Religious Is Like Being a Dancer
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