Bornsick: Lewis Walker on unlearning and searching for self

This May, as part of Serpentine’s Live programme, Lewis Walker premiered Bornsick at London’s Round Chapel, a raw and honest piece that blends dance, gymnastics, and personal storytelling into something entirely its own. Co-commissioned by Serpentine and Edinburgh Art Festival, the show explores what it means to live in a body shaped by outside forces, family, tradition, gender, and how we might begin to unlearn them.

In this conversation, Lewis Walker invites us into the world behind Bornsick, a performance shaped by memory, queerness, movement, and unlearning. Speaking openly about their journey as a solo artist, their roots in competitive gymnastics, and the challenge of stepping beyond inherited roles, Walker reflects on what it means to make work that’s both deeply personal and radically open.

hube: Bornsick suggests that human identity is an endless act of referencing and reshaping. How do you view the concept of authenticity in a world where everything is influenced by what has come before? Can we ever break free from this cycle, or do you see this paradox as an inherent part of our existence, both as individuals and as artists?

Lewis Walker: I see authenticity less as a fixed destination and more as a fluid concept. Especially in the context of New Age thinking, self-development, and self-improvement, authenticity is often framed as a goal, something to find or achieve. But I don’t believe that’s quite right. That framing feels overly individualistic, as if we can somehow extract a pure “self” that exists apart from everything we’ve absorbed.

To me, authenticity is actually about acknowledging that we’re always referencing, borrowing, and reshaping. Our identities are built through what we take in, what inspires us, what repels us, what’s handed down to us. When I’ve longed to be ‘authentic,’ I now realise it was often a desire to feel separate, to define myself in opposition to others. But the paradox is that real authenticity isn’t about separation, it’s about integration. It’s about owning the fact that we are relational beings, shaped by countless influences, and finding meaning in how we reclaim and reinterpret those influences as our own.

As for breaking free, I don’t think it’s about escaping the cycle entirely, but about becoming conscious of it. That’s where inner work, therapy, journaling, group work, recovery programs can make a difference. These processes help us see the patterns we’re living out and give us the tools to respond with more intention. So no, I don’t think the desire for authenticity is inherently wrong, but I do question the way it’s often pursued, as a kind of purity. I think the real beauty lies in the messiness of inheritance, influence, and transformation.

h: Your performance involves a character being built piece by piece. How do you use gymnastics and dance to embody this process of layering and unlearning, and what does this say about the construction of identity, particularly in the context of the queer body?

LW: My life has been made up with learning different techniques, gymnastics, dance, ballet, tap, modern, contemporary, all of which influenced the construct and the body. They are really useful at a certain time to build this construct of who you are and to learn a certain technique. But I think there comes a point where maintaining the rigidity of technique is no longer useful. You are built to dance like a male, look a certain way, dress a certain way, and especially within gymnastics, where you lose points if you don’t conform to the given technique. 

Now, I can use dance as an influence, but what’s different is that, in this current era, I’ve been able to reassess, relearn, and use movement to re-identify myself, drawing from queerness as a reference. When I retired as a gymnast and retrained as a dancer, or rather, I was able to understand what happened to my body and mind in competitive environments. I had to figure out how to relearn a sustainable relationship with my body and practice. I still use dance and gymnastics as a technique, but now I’m figuring out how I can intuitively work with them. And what does that look like? How do you queer the movement? How do I queer the body? It’s a constant reassessing: Am I doing this movement because I’ve been taught to do it, or is there another way that feels more innate.

What I find particularly interesting is that I grew up as a very queer child. I loved pop music in the 90s, watching Britney Spears, Spice Girls, and naturally imitating them. I danced in this hyper-feminine way. But when I began dance training, first at secondary school, then as an international gymnast, I realised you couldn’t move like that. It wasn’t celebrated, especially in competition. As I said before, you get marked down for such things. So you slowly unlearn your most natural inheritance, the things that you really desire. So, this whole process is about learning a unique, skilled way of moving. Since gravitating around queer people, it’s really been about unlearning heteronormative conditioning, because the culture around me I could never make sense of.

I want to naturally express myself, and I have not always been brave enough to be how I instinctively am in the world, even now. It’s a systemic issue of the gender binary. We have two ways of dancing: male and female, and then something in between. It’s hard for this to be palatable for everyone, so it’s usually much easier to simply conform to one or the other. 

An honest approach to how people respond to my work is that I fuse both parts of who I am—the learned, conditioned behaviour and the more inherent characteristics I was drawn to as a child. These are the things that resonate with people. I’m not fully on the side of conditioning, but neither am I radically on the more transgressive side. When I find this middle ground, it feels like a sweet spot for me, because I’m not disregarding everything I’ve learned, but I’m bringing back the essence of what I let go of.

h: You speak about ‘unlearning’ as part of your process. What does unlearning look like in your practice, and how does it connect to ideas of personal or collective liberation?

LW: Unlearning in my practice looks like therapy, journaling, step programmes, checking in with my friends, consciousness-raising. It’s a daily task to check in with myself and to understand where my flaws, blind spots and when I’m acting dysfunctionally. Unlearning, for me, is all of those things. It’s a constant process of figuring out what has been passed on to me. from my parents, from institutions, from schools, and trying to discern what is deeply making me a better human for myself and for others.

When you look at that within an art form, something like dance or gymnastics, as a young boy, you’re expected to embody a very specific masculine ideal. But I always wanted to move like the girls. I wanted to wear their leotards, do my hair like theirs, and experience that freedom of expression. That version of myself just wasn’t allowed. It wasn’t possible, especially in competition. It wouldn’t have been palatable.

So now, my work is about unlearning the idea that I still have to follow those rules. And while that might sound simple in conversation, in practice it’s incredibly hard. When I’m alone in the studio, just me and my movement, that old conditioning doesn’t disappear, it’s right there in my body.

Right now, I’m rehearsing in the same gymnastics facility where I grew up, and of course, being back in that space, seeing some of the same people, I can feel myself slipping into that younger version of me. Not the joyful, playful part, but the one who learned to perform in a certain way just to get by.

Even the small things bring it up. Someone came into the gym the other day, saw my eyebrow piercings, and said, “What’s on your face? You need to take those out.” Then they asked about my tattoos. And part of me thought, What is going on? I’m a grown adult. I can choose what I do with my body.

But in that moment, I felt it, that old instinct to shrink, to make myself small because someone else thinks they can still control or define me. Because they still see me as that child. So even yesterday, I had to remind myself: I don’t need to fight to prove anything. I don’t need to defend who I am. I can simply be, just exist, with my eyebrow piercings, in my own body, on my own terms.

h: Your work spans a diverse range of influences and media, from gymnastics to dance, film, fashion, and music. What are the primary influences that shape your creative process? What inspires you, both in terms of personal experiences and the world around you?

LW: I think whenever I approach a work, I always try to dig back into my past, so I’m making something that’s relevant to my experience, whether that’s from childhood, from the present, or from what’s happening during my transition into queerness and adulthood. My relationships with my family, my friends, all of that feed into it.

My strongest influences are really my close friends: like Michele Ocelli, who’s a hypnotherapist, Chad Curry, a performance artist, Courtney Deyn, who is my partner and also runs a dance company, and Sarah Lewis, a filmmaker. They’re all these incredible, passionate artists. Somehow, I’ve found myself surrounded by them, and it’s not necessarily what they do, but their essence that inspires me. They push me, not to make work like them, but to keep offering art as a service.

My family is definitely an influence, too. In 2023, I created a show called Family Piece about them. None of them are dancers. It was my mum, my dad, my brother, my sister, and my partner. We dressed them all up in wigs, nails, and leotards, and they performed at the Lilian Baylis Theatre. So yes, the influences always come from things close to me.

I’ve never been a dance fiend, and I’ve never been particularly inspired by dance performance. There are artists and choreographers I admire, but gymnastics had a real hold on me. I was obsessed. From the age of seven, I loved the discipline, the competition, the music, the dance, the culture. I’ve never felt that same pull in the dance world. Gymnastics, even though its artistic lens isn’t great in my opinion, still inspires me deeply.

h: What impact do you hope Bornsick will have on its audiences, especially when it comes to their understanding of identity and self-determined transformation?

LW: What I’m always aiming for in my work, especially in Bornsick, is to create a moment of pause. A space where people are reminded that transition is always possible. And I don’t just mean transition in the queer sense, but in the broader, human sense: the idea that at any point, you can shift direction. You can break out of one part of your life and step into another.

Life often feels like a loop. We get stuck in patterns, in routines, in relationships, in the stories we tell ourselves. What I try to do through performance is to represent long-term transformation in short, concentrated moments. I want people to feel that shift. To sense that change is always within reach.

This runs alongside my movement practice, which is rooted in consent. It’s about recognising that, in any interaction, you have the right to ask for change. For example, we might do endurance-based tasks, like holding or hugging someone, but at any point, you’re allowed to shift. Maybe it feels good for the first five minutes, but then something changes. You’re uncomfortable. You want to move. That awareness, that permission to adapt, is central to what I’m doing.

What I hope the audience takes away is not just the spectacle, though that’s part of it, but the sense that they’ve witnessed evolution. That they’ve seen people change in real time. Because I think that’s how liberation works. That’s how revolution begins: with the realisation that we don’t have to stay stuck. We don’t have to remain in this political system, in this family dynamic, in this version of ourselves. We can move through it.

I know that might sound lofty, and I don’t expect every audience member to walk away with a grand epiphany. But that’s the energy I build into the work. Of course, some people will just see acrobatics and think, “Wow, they did a somersault!” And that’s totally fine. You can’t control an audience, nor should you try to. For me, the joy of making work lies in making it entertaining. My job as a performer is to offer an experience. That experience might not always be comfortable or “nice,” but it should feel alive. I want people to come away feeling something, ideally, a whole range of things.

h: Looking ahead, where do you want your movement practice to go next? Are there new themes or forms you’re excited to explore?

At the moment, I want to expand my teaching practice, teach more consistently with hypnotherapist Michele Occelli and build momentum around our workshop MOVE HYPNO. I simultaneously want to choreograph for competitive athletes, infusing dance and art-based practices in the gymnastics arena. Within my performance work, I am always contemplating how to increase the transformative/healing potential that an audience member can experience during a show. I do not think art should just be a spectacle, it should be a portal for growth and change, and this is what I want to pursue going forward.