After the novella, movie, play and opera, Brokeback Mountain: The Ballet is on its way.
Image: Elyse Mertz/Hudson Valley Dance Festival 2026
By David Hudson
The new dance production opens the 5th Underground Uptown Dance Festival (January 13-18, 2027) at Guggenheim New York.
The one-act piece has been put together by The Works & Process. It features choreography by Pontus Lidberg and music by David Conte.
The show was developed during Works & Process residencies at Bethany Arts Community, Green Box Arts, Modern Accord Depot, and The Campus at Marlboro Music.
You probably know the story, but for anyone who has still never seen the movie or read Annie Proulx’s iconic book, it begins in 1963.
“Brokeback Mountain, the Ballet follows the tragic romance of Ennis and Jack, two shepherds, lost for words, caught between desire, fear, conflict, and intimacy…burdened with the unspoken depths of longing.”
Brokeback Mountain was originally published in The New Yorker in 1997, for which it won the National Magazine Award for Fiction in 1998. A slightly expanded version of the story was published in Proulx’s 1999 collection of short stories, Close Range: Wyoming Stories.
It was adapted into a movie by director Ang Lee in 2005, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledger. It won several Oscars, including Best Screenplay and Best Director, but lost out on Best Picture to Crash.
Opera and play
An opera version of Brokeback Mountain debuted at the Teatro Real in Madrid on January 28, 2014. Proulx wrote its English libretto. It has since enjoyed productions around the world.
A self-described “play with music” version appeared in London in 2023, starring Mike Faist as Jack and Lucas Hedges as Ennis.
“I wish I’d never written the story”
Proulx has praised both the movie and approved subsequent adaptations of the work, but has occasionally expressed frustration with the story’s impact. In particular, complaints from fans that it doesn’t have a happier ending.
In 2009, she told Paris Review, “I wish I’d never written the story. It’s just been the cause of hassle and problems and irritation since the film came out.
“Before the film it was all right…A large section of the population is still outraged. But that’s not where the problem was.
“I’m used to that response from people here, who generally do not like the way I write. But the problem has come since the film. So many people have completely misunderstood the story.
“I think it’s important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience, but unfortunately the audience that Brokeback reached most strongly have powerful fantasy lives. And one of the reasons we keep the gates locked here is that a lot of men have decided that the story should have had a happy ending.
“They can’t bear the way it ends — they just can’t stand it. So they rewrite the story, including all kinds of boyfriends and new lovers … And it just drives me wild.”
Cowboy “crock”
In a later interview in 2019, for CBC Radio’s Writers & Company she said she wrote the story to deconstruct the mythology around cowboys.
“The West in general is homophobic and Wyoming spectacularly so. Over the years, I’ve had a lot of gay friends and I had some gay friends in Wyoming too. I knew perfectly well that the general American belief about cowboys — that they spent their lives looking for lost calves, strumming on the guitar and dancing and being out in the high lonesome and yodeling — was a crock.”
Source: https://www.queerty.com/brokeback-mountain-takes-a-new-form-as-a-ballet-20261103/
