“What if the Pope was a lesbian?”

REIMAGINING QUEER FUTURES: an interview with choreographer Hannah Bertram and the bertie collective.

Vikki Marie Page. 02/09/2025.

The text has been edited from the original interview. You can read the interview below or listen to the audio version at the end.

VP: Hannah, I want to say a huge thank you because you're my first interviewee for Feminist Visions. So, I've known you for many years as a friend, and as a creative, who I've had the absolute joy of working with on many occasions. One thing that always strikes me about the way that you work is not only your commitment to both the artistic and creative excellence, but also your unwavering dedication to social and environmental issues, and particularly how you lead your projects with care, from the heart, and always seeking to lift up those who you work with, and to really embody the values that you are connecting to thematically into your methods and approaches to how you work.

HB: Thanks! That's so nice to hear.

VP: To date, from your work that I know of climate change and environmental issues have really been at the core of what you've done, especially with Impact, your organisation. But the piece today that I wanted to talk to you about, that you've created through the Bertie Collective ventures away a little bit from the climate change and environmental issues, more into the possibilities of queer imaginaries through dance and Chinese pole. Could you talk a little bit, for people who don't know about your work and Bertie, or this piece, could you tell us about it?

HB: Yeah, it does feel like a slight sidestep, because it's mostly been an environmental focus in my previous work, but the whole overarching aim I'm realising with my work, is all about hope and creating a different future, and having a positive vision to work towards. I'm discovering for myself, that that's a theme that goes through everything. And that hope was a real north star in this piece, but I realised that that's the basis for all my environmental work as well.

Hope…I was listening to a podcast, and they were talking about the difference between optimism and hope, and basically saying that optimism is kind of this belief that everything's going to be fine, but you just kind of stick a grin on, and you go around, and everything's going to be okay, I don't need to do anything about it, I'm just optimistic. Whereas hope is like, you realise the challenges that are around, but you still have faith that you can create something different, and that there is a different way to be. So, it's this kind of a proactive, positive force.

With this particular focus on queer people, this show that I just made, Translation, was with Bertie Collective, which is a new company - I've got a few different ones for different things, different project-based companies - Bertie Collective came about through a collective of movement artists who are all dancers and Chinese pole artists - we're all hybrid movement artists.

In the R&D (research and development), we were looking purely at the intersection of those movement languages. Through that, there was something that just felt kind of queer about what we made through that R&D. That's why the next phase then just kind of naturally became wanting to make a queer show. The show became about a positive vision for queer people. I wanted to make it so that it wasn't imaginary, so that it wasn't this kind of utopian, imaginary world. It's something concrete that people could envisage happening. The show was set as a documentary in 2055, looking back over the past 30 years about what changed and about how we made the change to create a different future for queer people.

VP: There is a line that you were using in relation to the piece, which provokes us to imagine queer futures. The statement/question was, “What if the Pope was a lesbian?” I think there's so many layers of radical thinking around that question itself, in terms of even women being able to be a Pope let alone the questions around sexuality that obviously connect so importantly to debates within and around the Church and the Church's position. I'd be really keen to hear from you around what the feminist and queer visions were that you're evoking with that statement, but also with the broader piece and the work. You’ve mentioned hope, but going beyond hope, what is that kind of vision for the future?

HB: Yeah, so in practical terms, if we think about the things that the show lays out, for example, the Pope being a lesbian, there's also a non-binary UK Prime Minister. Do we have any other kind of major statements like that? I think those are the main two. It's all working towards a complete vision of equality. And I'm going to say like neutral celebration, like it's lifting everybody up.

Another thread of the piece is about a vision for society based on a foundation of kindness. This whole vision is about accepting everybody. When we say accept people for who we are, I don't mean like Hitler. But, you know, taking it in the way that I'm sure like you understand it to be intended. It's about being able to understand each other. We have so many problems in the world to face as humanity. This is like linking back to the environmental stuff. And yet humanity creates so many problems for itself. We've got enough to face together, why are we creating all of these issues of like, scapegoating trans people, for example. There's so many, so many inequalities within humanity.

So, the big vision is for us all, it's not tolerance. It's not just acceptance. It's not just equality. It's an actual celebration of each other. I think those kinds of foundational pillars are of hope.

VP: And hope not in a blind faith, or a passive type of hope. But hope in that is a radical, active hope. It's a recognition of where we're at, where the world is at. Where our politics, economics, everything is at and moving from there in quite a, like, radical, revolutionary way.

HB: Yes, exactly. And just going back to your original point about the Pope being a lesbian and that kind of radical element to it. I think, we do need a revolution. We do need radical change. Asking people to imagine how different the world would be if the Pope was a lesbian, the aim is to make you think, to be able to imagine that, radically different place. All these changes we want to see in the world - they do need something radical. So why not imagine how that could be and then how we could get there.

VP: You're touching on an important point, which is provoking people to imagine that as a possibility. Why is that so difficult to imagine? What prevents us from being able to imagine that being a future reality? Or even wanting to imagine that for some people? It highlights a lot of different things in terms of what it brings up – why could that not be possible? What's going on there? There's all of those barriers become really evident when you kind of ask a question like that.

HB: Yeah, the bringing up the barriers is the way that we can carve out a different path. Because I think it brings up as well the place of complacency or acceptance of, like, oh, that's just how the world is. That maybe is like a trap to fall into. Whereas if you can say, hmm, but hey, what if this was to happen? Even if that doesn't happen, exactly like what you just said. What are the barriers to making that happen? And why can't we then tackle those?

VP: So, this goes on to my next question, which is the role of art, creativity and movement, in helping us to both imagine these other possibilities in these other worlds but also embark on this kind of active process of world making through pieces, creative pieces, and so on. Tell me about, for you, the role, and maybe that of movement - because I think movement is less discussed - when we think about the role of art and creativity, we often think of the visual - and it's really interesting as a movement practitioner, how do you experience the possibilities of world making and actively engaging with creating different possibilities and realities - through dance, through Chinese pole, through capoeira, through other movement practises that you engage with?

HB: Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think that anything creative, makes you practise that skill of imagination, being resourceful and being creative and not accepting what is and being able to create something new.

With movement, there's infinite possibilities. And I think that's also something that, personally, I'm always so interested in. I'm such a jack-of-all-trades with movement. It's like, what else can I explore with my body? What else is possible? The human body is amazing. There's so much that's possible to do with it and I think that's fascinating. The body's ability to heal and repair and grow and change and acquire new skills. It's so exciting.

So maybe that's one dimension. I think there's something about moving with other bodies that there's a connection there. There's a comfort that you build with these other people. There's a care there. Again, creatively, if you're improvising, for example, you're not in control of what the other person is doing. You may be going to respond to something that they throw at you, and then you're going to throw something at them and it's going to be received.

Again, it's like infinite possibilities, but it's also working together. A lot of these qualities are necessary for change for queer people, for change environmentally, for just general change, which can come through in these spaces of movers being together, which are like, kindness, the compassion, the care, the, connectedness, the, proximity to each other.

To go slightly go into the environmental side of things again, I think this is really important for any positive change. Have you heard of the Inner Development Goals?

VP: No, I haven't.

HB: It's a fairly new initiative. Like, the Sustainable Development Goals, the SDGs. So, there's this initiative that's been created called the IDGs, which is essentially a set of inequalities for outer change that have been identified. It's almost, like, we need to cultivate these qualities within people and society and the system so that we can achieve the SDGs, but also, I just think, for anything, really.

And there's a lot of things that are, like, compassion, empathy, creativity, imagination, lots of things like that you can look up. Lucy Bird, has done some research into how dance can develop these IDGs. I feel like that relates to your question of how movement, like, can, yeah, help with these visions.

VP: In the piece, having seen the show, one of the things that I found interesting is how you kind of move between dance on the ground, choreographed dance, individual dance, but with Chinese pole. Which is itself, I understand, from my very limited knowledge, you know, kind of one person on a pole generally and so on. And you really transition from that kind of individual to collective body on and off the pole and through those different levels. Why was it important for you to bring together both kind of choreographic dance and Chinese pole and to kind of play with those intersections between the individual and the collective to reimagining a future possibility from a queer perspective?

HB: Often Chinese pole is in the kind of circus realm of things and then dance is in the dance realm. It was nice to work with hybrid artists who know how to move in both ways and are interested in approaching Chinese pole, which is a bit more, you have to be a little bit more like rigid and structured because otherwise you die. But if you're approaching it as a dancer, then it's really interesting to see what comes out of that.

It was important for me to not have these as like two distinct techniques. The idea was to create a hybrid movement language between everything to just see what came through from that. In terms of the individual and collective within this vision for queer communities, I think that we use the pole quite a bit in the show to represent a person in power. We had a Trump section and then a lesbian Pope section and the non-binary UK prime minister section. The idea in those moments was for the pole to kind of represent a place of power and leadership. What we were experimenting with or hopefully showing the audience is that we would have, say, some dancers on the floor and they would put one of these characters up on the pole or they would hold them on the pole.

We did an exercise in the rehearsal process of just like, how can you put someone on a pole? How can you take them off? How can you keep them up there? This person is needing your assistance up there, these people on the ground are keeping them there. The idea of exploring all those different things was like our power as individuals within society that then become a collective that can place an individual representative up in a place of power in the same way we can take them down off that place of power and in the same way we can keep them up.

The messaging there was, I know there are some complications and there's little bits of corruption going on sometimes, but the idea was to talk about different ways that we can be powerful as individuals that come together as a community and how we can use our collective power to put someone in a position of power. Or we can take them down. That's how we kind of used the ground and the pole and that relationship between a collective body and an individual.

VP: It strikes me as well as the kind of putting up and taking down, that kind of collective role in helping people get up there and stay up there who may not be able to, who may not be the traditional actors who will just get up there. Also, that effort, that collective effort to support each other and to lift each other as we rise and so on. I think there's an aspect of that which comes through in your piece as well, which is interesting. I would like to invite you to think about or to visualise a particular vision for the future. From a feminist perspective, what would be a vision that you would like to imagine as being a possibility or invoke in general or with this queer focus?

HB: My vision, I think, I mentioned it earlier, everything comes back to kindness. My vision I would love for a future for the world to be like acting from kindness. I think that there's so many reasons why people do, in inverted commas, “bad things”. And we can find ways to understand why that happens, etc. But it would just be amazing for people to act through a lens of kindness. I think that would solve so many things, and that is radical. That is like a wild thing to imagine.

I had someone else on a podcast, a different podcast recently saying that if your goals can be achieved within your lifetime, they're not big enough. Do you think this is achievable in your lifetime? No. Okay, so it's a big goal. When you asked that question initially, it's interesting the process my mind went through, and I would maybe assume that most people's do - this is kind of an illustration of what we were talking about with why it's wild to imagine the Pope being a lesbian. Because you start to think about things that the current reality would allow to happen. Then I had to think, no, that's not what the question is. The question is, what would be my vision? And so, it feels kind of emotional, sharing that as well. It makes me so sad that the amount of unkindness that there is.

VP: It feels like there's a certain degree of vulnerability and courage needed to say, to put out there a vision and an imaginary. Because we can have these big ideas and hopes and so forth, but verbalising it, feels like that can be, yeah, it takes a lot of courage to put it out there.

HB: And I think with something like that as well, because that can be seen as this unrealistic, hippy-dippy kind of view. Which is why I think it can feel vulnerable, because when I've maybe put this fact out there before, it can sometimes be put down a little bit as like, “oh, it's unrealistic” or whatever. The thing is, maybe it is, but why should it be and why should that stop us working towards it as well? And, if you don't believe that something can change then that’s terrifying.

VP: And I think if something feels realistic, maybe it’s not radical enough, in this moment. Because are we really going to change anything that’s reproducing the inequalities, the violence, the hate, everything that exists in this world, we have to go beyond what feels immediately possible or realistic to even get close to making something more positive in our current situation.

HB: Otherwise, we’re just stuck. And revolutions have happened before; change has happened before.

VP: On that note, I would like to say thank you very much for speaking with me today and for sharing your visions.

Listen to the audio recording of the interview and watch the show trailer below:

 Connect with Hannah on Instagram at @hanbertie and check out more of Hannah’s work at hannahbertram.co.uk