Lewis Walker’s uncanny gymnastics confront the ‘paradox’ of humanhood

When Lewis Walker was a child, they came to train at Richmond Gymnastics Association with their parents. They spent their youth shaping themself into a Great British gymnast and Acrobatic Gymnastics World Champion. Two decades later and they’re back at Richmond Gymnastics Association rehearsing Bornsick, a new performance piece commissioned by Serpentine and Edinburgh Art Festival. This time, Walker is on the sprung floor, cocooned under a blanket of latex, with their parents once again watching from the side.

Bornsick, from the dry run I witnessed alongside Walker’s family and friends, is a feat of the artist’s physicality. They feel out movements, relearn gestures and corkscrew their body to the point of uncanniness. At one point, Walker backbends into a perfect arch and does circuits of the room, looking increasingly un-human in the best way possible. In the performance, Walker has a severe game face, but the person behind it, as we chat on the benches afterwards, is light and charming. Do they view the performance as a character? “It’s funny you say that because another collaborator who came to watch said, ‘I wonder what everyone else will think because it’s autobiographical and about your experience’,” they say. “But it’s not. I’m using tools from different mechanisms like gymnastics, music and dance to represent something. There definitely is a character and there is an arc, but it’s representative of many people.”

Walker was approached about constructing the piece last year when they were keen to focus solely on their teaching practice. “I was shifting my aesthetic from overtly queer, feminine, camp to more like something that lives between the stereotypes of gender,” they say. “I’m interested in how the path to queerness is not always linear, we’re always moving in and out.” At the same time, Walker fell down the rabbit hole of the theory that we’re governed by reptiles in human skin suits. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it really fascinated me. I found it humorous as a concept and relating it to queerness.” It’s hard to object to the idea that unzipping your human flesh suit to reveal your true lizard form isn’t peak gender performance.

I’m interested in how the path to queerness is not always linear, we’re always moving in and out – Lewis Walker

Walker drew from various references when it came to their body in the performance, working with dramaturg Elisabeth Mulenga. “We work a lot with otherworldly physicality and physicality that looks alien or reptilian. A lot of the work is inspired by breaking classical forms and creating something that doesn’t look humanly possible.” This sense of continuous reinvention forms the basis for Bornsick, but it accurately describes Walker’s career. After their time as a young GB gymnast, they retrained as a dancer so, for their entire life, they’ve been absorbing other people’s movements into their body.

“I thought I was reestablishing myself as an autonomous being, but dance teachers were like, ‘You still seem like a gymnast. You’re very obedient, you expect a certain type of feedback.’” Now, Walker is happy to be working independently. “I’ve decided that I don’t want to work for anyone else, I got to the point where I didn’t want anyone else’s movements in my body,” they say. “When I say breaking classical moulds, I mean breaking the moulds of moving that I thought I had to dance like. Now I do what I instinctively think is interesting.”

Walker is non-binary and the world of gymnastics is, like most sports, heavily gendered. Gymnasts in male categories had to wear “masculine colours” and were even marked down for expressly feminine movements. Though Walker’s coaches opposed the insane essentialism, it was part of the world. “You’re playing within their rules, and if you want to be successful, you sometimes have to lean into that,” they explain. “After I left, it took a while to figure out what dance was intuitive. When I was younger I was dancing like a little faggot – the inspiration was Britney and Brandy – but slowly you can see that weaned out of me. Now, it’s about how my body wants to move, not how I think it should move as a male-bodied person.” 

Bornsick is running at the Round Chapel, London from 21-22 May 2025, and at First Stage Studios, Edinburgh, on 23 August 2025. More information here.