Jeppe Hansen says Royal Winnipeg Ballet pressured him into leaving school
CBC News
Posted: Jul 8, 2013 4:33 AM CT
An aspiring ballet star is accusing the Royal Winnipeg Ballet of unfairly kicking him out of its school after he began acting in pornographic videos.
Jeppe Hansen, 22, had danced on stages around the world and studied in Montreal, New York City and his native Denmark before joining the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School in September 2012.
“My identity is built on being a ballet dancer,” he told CBC News.
“For me to come there was a big opportunity for me.”
But earlier this year, Hansen appeared in his first pornographic video — a side project and an opportunity, he said, to express himself in a new way — and RWB officials found out.
“They told me … they didn’t have any space for me because I did porn,” he said.
He accused the ballet company of unfairly trying to define what constitutes art.
“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,” Hansen said.
“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.'”
Hansen said he left the school in late March. In April, he left Winnipeg and moved to New York City to pursue adult entertainment full-time under the screen name Jett Black.
“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,” Hansen said.
“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.”
Hansen appeared in his first pornographic video in February with the website CockyBoys, under the performance name Jett Black.
In addition to sex-only videos, the website’s owner, Emmy-award-winning producer Jake Jaxson, says he’s trying to blur the lines between mainstream entertainment and adult entertainment with films that include a plot along with sex scenes.
“The films are meant to be entertaining and sexual at the same time,” Jaxson said.
Jaxson said his films challenge what society considers to be mainstream and the kind of artists the public celebrates.
“I don’t like movies that show young people’s heads cut off or their arms ripped from their body. And everyone goes and watches that … and those performers are not looked at as being outside of the mainstream,” Jaxson said.
