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Moving Conversations

Moving Conversation #7: Vjuan Allure, Stephane Mizrahi + Melissa Blanco Borelli

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Moving Conversation #7, held on November 18th, 2016, was red hot. For this edition Modern Moves put two iconic pioneers from the global voguing and ballroom scene — Stephane Mizrahi and DJ and producer Vjuan Allure — in conversation with Melissa Blanco Borelli, Senior Lecturer in dance studies at Royal Holloway University. As a dance form, culture and movement language, voguing is more popular now than ever. With artists from Yelle to FKA Twigs incorporating (or appropriating) voguing into their aesthetic, not to mention the release of new documentaries on voguing and ballroom culture such as Kiki, voguing has reached a cultural apex. For this conversation, which was centered on queerness, sexuality, and a strenuous critique of heteronormativity, we heard from the pioneers of the field.

It all started off with a teaser dance by Mother Steffie, known for a style of vogue called Old Way which centers on clean lines, geometry and posing-as-dance. Steffie, who wore a captivating red catsuit with opulent fringe dangling in all the right places, his face covered with a matching red feather fan, worked every corner of the room — the floor, the space aisle between the seats, the back, the front as well as the balcony.

At the end of the performance, Melissa Blanco Borelli asked the panelists to describe what voguing is, particularly for people in the audience who may be unfamiliar with the culture. “I was there at 11 1/2 years old in the club when I learned about voguing,” Vjuan Allure said, locating the origins of voguing to the drag balls in Harlem of the 30s and 40s. “Voguing is a dance to express yourself but it’s also a battle dance. It is actually a fight between people in the club that don’t like each other. That’s what it’s supposed to be but it’s more amicable now.” This particular kind of fight, to be clear, is more of a creative fight, not one with blood and actual punches. It is a battle of aesthetics, an attempt to see who can throw the hardest punch with the best outfit and who can outdo the competition with better moves or another type of surprise performative element. The battle sentiment of voguing is a way of having creative tricks up your sleeves that will make you and your performance come out on top.

“It’s self-expression,” Allure says. “It’s also fabulous drama. It’s moving [in the way] of model poses. Stretch, acrobatics, and definitely a lot of attitude. You cannot vogue without attitude. It’s you coming out of your shell and being presenting it on the floor.”

When Mother Steffie finally caught his breath, he joined in the conversation.

“Voguing is a dance style that takes its roots from poses, lines. You can use also Egyptian influences when you do your poses. It’s about being elegant, present. Now in ballroom culture you have different styles of voguing, which is Old Way, New Way, Vogue Femme, and in Vogue Femme you have two different styles: soft and cunt and dramatics.”

We weren’t going to let him talk about the styles without demonstrating them to us, of course.

Old way, as the audience initially saw in the teaser dance, privileges strong lines, cat walking and posing. “Each time you go a new direction, you pop,” Steffie told us. New way, on the other hand, is really all about the stretch — stretching muscles and awkward, bone bending poses. Vogue Femme, a form created by trans women of color, includes the catwalk, hands performance, duckwalk, spins, dips and is all about attitude, femininity and being “pussy,” a ballroom term used to indicate heightened femininity and which also points to the de/construction of gender. That point was made clear when Steffie added a crucial element to Vogue Femme performance. “When you vogue femme you have to bounce.”

Old way is straight and linear, whereas with vogue femme you push your hips out to give off heightened femininity. “Transsexuals used to dance vogue,” Steffie said, “and they took the style and owned it, made it appropriate for them. They didn’t want to be masculine. They wanted to be feminine.”

“And the reason there’s a category called vogue femme,” Allure jumped in, “is when you’re a gay club you have what we call “butch queens,” which are guys, which would be us. Then you have people that are drags, which are guys who get into drag. But you also have transsexuals and when they were in the club, they wanted to vogue, too, but they made it very feminine. That became their style.”

“There used to be a category in ballroom called “butch queen voguing like a femme queen,” so a guy imitating how a transsexual vogues. That’s what became vogue femme.”

With all of these various communities coming together — drag queens, gay men, and transsexuals, all of them interested in vogue — Melissa Blanco Borelli wondered what factors were in play that allowed these parties to innovate, to seize voguing in a way and make it their own.

“There was an ostricization regarding certain styles,” Allure said, “because old way was the classic style. When things started getting more acrobatic, people started to bend their bodies differently, including splits and clicks and doing more hieroglyphics that were more than just straight lines.”

But because not everyone could dance that way, Old Way became its own style. Like all forms of dancing, voguing requires precision, attitude and conviction in order to deliver a compelling performance.

After talking through the various elements of vogue, a perfect tool kit for the free voguing workshop Mother Steffie led after the panel, the conversation shifted towards a discussion about beats, or the importance of the DJ in pulling out a successful, emotive performance from the dance floor.

“We didn’t have our own music. What we used at balls was music that was older or anything that was out at the time. I started to make beats and I kept making them. I made hundreds of them, almost thousands of them, and now we have a whole arsenal of beats. We have other beat makers that make these hyper beats. The hyper beats are there to garner this energy.” To achieve that level of energy, balls are constructed of various layers of sound: the call and response feedback from the crowd, who shout house names at the competitors, the commentator, a master of ceremonies who spurs the performers on while also narrating what they are doing and keeping the show moving, and finally the DJ, who knows how to play the right kind of beat that will pull out the right kind of performance from the dancer.

We all have some kind of relationship to beats, a point Melissa Blanco Borelli knew all too well when she asked Mother Steffie to talk about his favorite ballroom beat.

“The ‘ha’. I like ‘the ha,'” he said. “I like Vjuan’s stuff. I like MikeQ’s beats, too. Also in Paris there’s some producers that want to venture into [beat making] and the first thing I told them is, ‘If you want to make some voguing beats, you’ve got to learn how to vogue! How else are you going to get the inspiration to get the girls going if you don’t know what’s about and how you feel it?”

“The beats give you the energy,” he continued, pointing ultimately to voguing as about endurance, especially in the battling stage. You advance to the next round of competition in a category if and only if the judging panel unanimously agrees that you brought the category with your performance. A single “chop,” or disqualification, from any judge kicks you out of the competition and from advancing to further rounds. You need “10s across the board,” as it is said. Let’s say a category starts with 10 contestant. The entire goal is to find a single winner of that category, meaning that people are “chopped” until there’s a winner, and the winner from a previous round, usually seen as the best, keeps competing until they win or get beat by someone else.

With this in mind, beats have a special meaning in ballroom. “When you have to do one battle and then you go through. Then the second battle, you’re going through again. Then the third battle you’re going through. You’re already out of breath and then there’s this saying, ‘No Breather’ so you gotta go through the next battle again. You need hard beats that are going to give you energy to keep going again, surpass yourself.”

In as much as voguing is about self-expression, community and self-acceptance, Melissa Blanco Borelli noted, what are the ways that voguing as a uniquely queer of color political-aesthetic cultural form become a tool for capital. What does something like RuPaul’s Drag Race, for instance, do to the history of voguing?

“It’s great to have someone like RuPaul in commodity culture,” Blanco Borelli noted, “and showing these different creative expressions of the queer self. But then it’s also what happens to the history and to the innovators and people like Vjuan Allure, who were around from day one. What happens when it’s commodified?”

Vjuan Allure spoke about the way he always grills newcomers to the ballroom scene whenever they want to write a paper about voguing or do anything related to ballroom at all.

“Why? You have nothing to do with this culture. You’ve never been to a ball. How are you going to write about it? What are you going to say about it? The community has been taken advantage of before, so they kind of very on their Ps and Qs when someone comes in. RuPaul walked a ball in drag in his earlier career, but he did not compete. But on his show he does have people that are in the ballroom scene that are actually drag queens that are part of the houses.”

“He wanted to do an album as a tribute to the ballroom scene, and that was the album called Butch Queen, and that was the one I worked on. Purposefully I did not give him ballroom beats. I gave him beats that were different, that were things he didn’t have. A lot of people believe that RuPaul has nothing to do with the ballroom scene when actually he does. As long as we continue to monitor what people are doing with the ballroom scene we keep appropriation out of the works. Or at least try to.”

The spirited question and answer session included questions about whether or not it’s cheating if women are involved in ballroom; safe spaces; the presence of voguing on YouTube and the internet; about the problematics of racial dynamics and competing with fellow people of color; and personal confessions about how voguing has shaped their own lives.

The depth of this seventh conversation was in the power of thinking through popular culture and dance while simultaneously thinking seriously, and in an intersectional way, about race, gender, sexuality and dance. We learned that it’s hard to talk about dance, really any kind at all, without also taking into account how that dance is impacted by sexuality and or queerness, gender and racial dynamics.

We closed the Conversation with a free voguing workshop led by Mother Steffie and an after party with beats by Vjuan Allure, a party where everyone got to be a diva for the night. And isn’t that what it’s all about?

MADISON MOORE

Moving Stories

On The Allure Of The Catwalk

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw9LOrHU8JI

ONE: YOU BETTA WORK

I don’t really remember how I first discovered the American drag celebrity RuPaul, but I do remember she was always fabulous. At the height of her career, sometime around 1992, I was a young, closeted black twink, or bwink, I guess, and I felt an immense pressure to do what I could to hide my sexuality. So I pretended, failing miserably, to have no interest in drag queens, divas and the like. I couldn’t publicly like RuPaul for fear of outing myself, I rationalized. The thing is, if you were able to watch TV or hear a radio in the early to mid 90s, you knew about RuPaul. She was that famous.

What’s interesting about RuPaul and the specificity of her rise to fame in the early 1990s is that she popped up right around the corner from Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning, a documentary about the New York voguing scene which dropped in 1990, and not that far from the publication of Gender Trouble, a seminal text on gender and performativity by Judith Butler, which was also published in 1990. The ’90s also saw the rise of the supermodel era — Naomi, Cindy, Christy, Linda. In many ways, then, RuPaul was a crystallisation of conversations about gender, drag, and fashion modeling that boiled particularly strong in the ’90s.

The RuPaul song everyone knew, from New York to Kentucky, was “Supermodel (You Better Work!),” an upbeat dance track from 1993 that peaked at number 45 on the Billboard Hot 100 that year. In the video, RuPaul plays the role of an international supermodel. The whole thing feels like a fashion editorial, with footage of RuPaul posing for the camera and close ups of her putting on make up and getting ready to be seen, a double commentary on the aesthetic labor of the fashion model and the coming-into-being of the drag queen, both bodies that are transformed by the power of make up for a performance of some type, catwalk, nightclub lounge or otherwise.

“Work! Turn to the left. Work! Now turn to the right. Work! Sashay, shantay!,” RuPaul sings.

The overall message of “Supermodel (You Better Work!)” is to love yourself, accept who you are and let your inner colors shine, a powerful message geared for the mainstream yet coming from a celebrity female impersonator.

Whenever I’ve listened to “Supermodel” I’ve always been struck by the specific instructions to “work,” especially in a queer performance context. That’s why what interests me about “Supermodel (You Better Work!)” is twofold. On the one hand, I love taking the “o” out of the word “work” and replacing it with an “e,” what I have called elsewhere “work — with an e,” or the embodied, reclaimed labor, to use Joseph Roach’s term, of work you do because it is creative and because you love and want to do it, not because you have to.

“Work! Cover girl. Work it girl! Do a twirl. Do your thing on the runway,” RuPaul sings on the track.

“Work,” in a popular, queer of color context, is spelled in a number of ways: werk, worq, werq, worrrrrk, purposeful misspellings that I think actually do the job of tying queer aesthetic labor off as work you do because it’s exciting, creative and embodied, and also because it reflects some core aspect of yourself.

But I’m also curious about why so much popular queer performance, and black queer performance and music in particular, is so focused on “working,” as RuPaul evidences, taking up the allure of being fabulous, flawless, and working the catwalk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfCGTJNZBqs

A few years ago, when I was living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — before Williamsburg reached its Whole Foods-having, luxury condo apex — there was a tiny gay club I used to go to called Sugarland. Pizza joint by day, gay club at night. My friend Jeremy and I went there one weekend, not quite the opening weekend but in any case the venue had not been open all that long, and we watched this queer underground New York band The Ones perform a song called “Flawless.” We really loved it! “Just like perfection, absolutely flawless,” the trio sang over and over to a house-flavored beat. When we left the venue we had the song stuck in our heads, singing it at 3am all the way down Bedford Avenue, wondering how you could make a whole dance track focused only on feeling good, looking flawless.

Something interesting happens when the language of modeling and fashion is poached in that de Certeauian way from a purely commercial context, the world of the commercial fashion industry, and thrown into queer performance, where what the catwalk displays is not an item of clothing that can be purchased by an editor in multiple and then sold back to an audience, but queer creativity, personhood and imagination.

The catwalk is a performance space where individualized fabulousness gets performed for the public, where fabulousness is about creativity and self-assertion through the optics of style, not bald commerce or dividends. In the process of such public displays of style, fabulousness turns out to be very much about storytelling, a certain poetics of the self, and narrating that self through movement and posing on the catwalk. In the end, the catwalk is the space where queer aesthetic labor, or that “work with an e,” is put on display. The aesthetic of fabulousness on the queer runway is about using fashion and the body to imagine individual, small scale Muñozian utopias right here, right now, and in real time.

TWO: WALK FOR ME

As a closeted queer teenager in Ferguson, Missouri I secretly watched hours and hours of catwalk video footage on Fashion TV because I was fascinated by runway modeling as affect. I loved watching the models walk back and forth, back and forth, because even though what they were selling to the room was the garments themselves, what captivated me was the allure. I liked the fantasy, what they did on the stage, how they walked. And where reality television is concerned, shows about fashion models come and go, from America’s Next Top Model to The Face. Though ANTM did include catwalks at certain points throughout the show, they were never the main dish. ANTM focused primarily on how to take pictures or, to paraphrase the art critic Craig Owens, how to pose as though you were already a picture. It was not until Bravo’s Make Me A Supermodel dropped in 2008 that the runway walk was part of the weekly competition and elimination process, a show where you were judged both on your ability to take editorial pictures as well as on your runway walk.

Needless to say, Make Me A Supermodel was my preferred reality fashion show of the bunch!

When Beverly Johnson, the first African-American model to appear on the cover of American Vogue, worked the catwalks in the 1970s she transformed the room with her elegance. She was giving a fantasy. Through movement, makeup and accessories, models draw you into their world, and it’s this sense of imagination and otherworldliness that has always interested me about the performative possibilities of the runway.

But when catwalk performance is poached from the world of the commercial fashion industry and used creatively in a queer of color performance context, for instance, it takes on a new meaning. This new meaning has to do with doing fabulousness as self-worth, and it’s a sentiment that’s even embedded in much of queer dance music.

In Erikatoure Aviance’s 2011 single “My Pumps,” for instance, she sings about the love of fashion and being on catwalks, and the sound of the pumps hitting the pavement is a key sonic element embedded in the track. The sound is about walking. It’s about movement. But it’s also the beat. “You can’t bring me down – cause I’ve got the shoes!,” Erikatoure Aviance sings, but, where its key is: “Swish, swish, swish, swish, sway, bitch you can’t come for my runway,” the sentiment here being fabulousness is queer personhood, and the runway is the place where that personhood is performed.

When the language of the catwalk is poached from the world of fashion and launched in a queer of color performance context the revised meaning it takes on has to do with fabulousness as self-worth, where the runway is the parade ground where queer fabulousness is turned on, animated.

So yes, in my earliest twink days I was drawn to fashion catwalks as a space where you’re meant to see and be looked at, a moving display case of identity where the job is to tell a story (and sell garments) by simply walking straight ahead. If you think about it, walking is actually pretty boring, if uneventful. It’s something most of us do all the time, every day, for no other reason than to get from point A to point B. Think, then, what it means to aestheticize or to make performance out of a thing as seemingly mundane as a walk. But that’s just it: when elevated to performance, when put on a runway, when made a spectacle, walking begins to look a lot like dance.

One of my favorite dance-walks is from Beyoncé’s “Crazy In Love,” the 2003 single that to my eyes helped make her a household name. At the start of the video she pumps down a deserted industrial street, with a photo shoot vignette in the video aimed to position her as a model. The message is: I’m here, get into it — as powerful a message as any coming from a black woman performer working in a white dominated industry.

But it’s not just celebrities, fashion models and famous drag queens who get to elevate walking to the level of dance, because I also feel a personal connection to walking-as-dance-as-presence. When I go dancing one of my signature moves is walking around the room to the mood of the music like I’m on a catwalk, not at all an uncommon site if you’re at the club and there are some brown queens in the room. No matter how packed the club is I will still find some sliver of dance floor real estate, just a long enough corridor, and my friends and I will take turns walking to the music, working the room, going back and forth, back and forth, looking at each other, commenting on each other’s moves.

It’s not something I’ve ever seen happen in a straight club, or that I have seen straight people do. But if you’re at a club and there are enough queens in the room, especially black or brown queens, you’ll see someone walking around, feeling flawless — walking as dance.

To really punch up this connection I’m making between the catwalk, fabulousness, queerness and browness, I’m reminded of a viral YouTube video about Soul Train posted nearly two years ago by Darell Hunt. Soul Train, for its turn, was a successful televised variety show where black and brown folks danced down the soul train line, really a catwalk, to funk, disco, R&B, gospel and hip hop. In Hunt’s video, a must see, he dubs hilarious, sassy commentary about each dancer’s performance as they worked the Soul Train catwalk. While the performers are actually dancing and not really walking, they still use the language of the runway, the catwalk, to display their uniqueness, their style and their creativity.

The clip is centered around his positive reactions to the dancers as they hit the Soul Train line. “Yesssss,” he says. “Ow!” These terms are micro affirmations of black gesture and creativity, highlighting that fabulousness is a quality that when performed elicits a response from an audience. It does this by creating awe or astonishment in the viewer. As the dancers here pump down that catwalk, yaaas, they combine fashion and dance to really stake out a claim for a fabulous self. The dance moves themselves are about individuality, personality and creativity.

The Soul Train line was already a space where fabulous dancers of color worked a look and their dance moves on the catwalk, an early example of the catwalk as a parade ground for identity, creativity and personhood. But what I love about this video and about his commentary in particular is the way he uses the specificity of black queer language to infuse the already queer space of the Soul Train line with even more black queerness. “Come On, Pumps!,” he says, and if you visit his website you can even buy the tote bag.

At the end of the video he offers his own theory of fabulousness when he says, “You can’t out do black people.”

Part of the allure of poaching the language of the fashion model and throwing it into a queer performance context is the humorous ridiculousness of aestheticizing something so mundane as a walk. It’s not that it is funny, comical, or a joke, say in the sense of high camp, but that it is about doing something creative, framing, an everyday action. Nowhere is this more clear than in New York performer Paul Alexander’s — one of the singers in The One’s — track “Walk For Me,” an ode to the voguing scene. “I want you to take to the catwalk, darling,” Alexander chants, “you sure look gorgeous! Walk for body, walk for face. Walk it and snatch first place. Walk for me.”

It isn’t that the lyrics themselves are that funny, but what is amusing is that while he chants Kim Aviance stands next to him, dressed in full regalia, and as he says “Walk for me” she turns her body and on comes the treadmill/ There she is, walking in place, dressed in a full look, on the treadmill, as performance, as a catwalk. In this performance not only has a walk been turned into dance, into performance, but a treadmill, a machine meant to whip (or “torture”) bodies into shape, becomes fabulous. The high glam has to do with whether or not she can stay on the treadmill, looking fabulous, without falling and ruining the fantasy.

THREE: THE RUNWAY WORKSHOP

On YouTube there are countless tutorials and compilation videos, many of them produced by top fashion magazines, that offer the secrets of the catwalk or that otherwise highlight fabulous (or fierce) catwalk performances. But I’m interested in what happens when the language of the fashion runway, model walking and all the rest mixes with queer performance culture.

Much of the queer allure of the catwalk has to do with its connection to the ballroom scene, evidenced especially well in “Tens,” a 2014 Jennifer Lopez track about the vogue runway.”Eating the runway, serving the runway, marching the runway, eat that runway, walk,” she sings. “The whole idea,” Grandfather of the House of Ninja Archie Burnett said at the Berlin Voguing Out Festival in 2014, “is I’m fierce and I know it” Bringing this trope of fabulous, fierce walking into a queer lifeworld shows the extent to which performing fabulousness in the vogue ball is ultimately about the value of self-authorship.

Curious about the queer performance dynamics of the runway in a vogue ball context, during the summer of 2014 I went to the Berlin Voguing Out Festival where I participated in a series of pre-ball runway workshops at Motion*s, a dance studio in Kreuzberg that is also ground zero for a number of Berlin-based voguing workshops. This particular workshop was led by Archie Burnett, a legend in the global ball scene who travels internationally offering similar classes. There were only about 15 people in the class I was in. Some wore heels, others went for more comfortable shoes, and I was upset that I didn’t think to bring my own pumps to class. There were six guys and the rest girls. The point of this particular workshop, as with all the others, was to give people the essentials of the runway category.

We began by walking like our normal selves from one end of the room towards the mirror of the dance studio. This was the most important task, Burnett told us, because even though a model walk doesn’t seem natural, it should feel natural. He didn’t want any of us to walk the way we thought models were supposed to walk. From there Burnett prompted us to move like we were in a hurry to meet our friend for a drink, and we did this back and forth for a few minutes. Then we were told to walk like we were on our way to a hot date, altogether different kind of walk, one with seduction built in. Each of these walks has a different purpose, all inspired by a specific theatrical impulse or set up, and he was mainly encouraging us to think about the way we move inside our own bodies. At all times he told us not to walk the way we think models are supposed to walk. This was his way of allowing everyone to tap into their own creativity.

As we went through the exercises in the dance studio that’s when I realized there was an empowering aspect of the runway workshop, even if you weren’t competing in the ball. It was all about selling yourself as an object of creative energy. “Don’t walk to the music,” he’d say. “Walk to the attitude. You’re worth it!” he screamed over and over as we walked towards the studio mirror, and just the fact that he said “you’re worth it!” actually made you feel worth it. This is ultimately, I think, what the runway is about within a queer performance context. It’s not about asking for value nor is it about asking for permission. On the catwalk, fabulousness is a stern declaration of creativity, self-worth and possibility. It is happening now. It is happening in real time. And it is happening on the catwalk.

After the group exercise of catwalking towards the dance studio mirror with various scenarios, at the end of the class we did a mini runway show where each of us walked alone to music as a way of showing off what we learned. This time our only prompt was to find something about ourselves and sell it to the room. It could have been a piece of clothing we already had on or either one of our defining features. I’d never been more nervous than I was then. One girl piled her long hair into a ponytail and held it at the top of her head. The experience was cathartic in a lot of ways because the act of walking down the runway ushered in the confidence that comes with working with what you’ve got. Coming away from the runway seminar taught me how much voguing and runway work are about small scale utopias and a demand for self-authorship. Embracing a poetics of the self has a much more pronounced impact when you live in a world that consistently devalues your queer, brown sense of worth.

In the fashion industry as on the vogue ball floor, the catwalk is always about selling it, whatever you’re selling, and making an audience believe the fantasy. The act of selling something on a catwalk is a metaphor for performance itself, but it’s not just about bringing something to the table. It’s about how you yourself can put something new and interesting on the table itself. That’s for sure what the Soul Train line was about. You didn’t want to dance down the catwalk like the person who went just before you. What would be the point of that? So the issue becomes, what of yourself can you bring creatively that hasn’t been seen before? Fabulousness, then, is about the confidence of approaching the table but then putting something on it. Through spectacular performance and make-believe it is possible to gain confidence, express yourself creatively and imagine your own utopian version of the world in real time.

In his work on utopia José Muñoz wrote that a queer utopia is something from the future, something that’s not here, now, but that is coming. Performance is the space where queer utopias are enacted, and the stage is the actual platform where utopian visions can be realized. To my mind, the catwalk is precisely the utopian space where queer personhood, personality, creativity and innovation can be claimed. Instead of selling clothes and garments to magazine editors and tastemakers, what you’re actually putting up for show is your sense of self worth, your ideas and creativity. This sense of peacocking, of parading yourself around, is an important aspect for all kinds of brown and queer performance practices, because brown and queer people are constantly told that we are not good enough, that we don’t get to sit at the table, that we don’t have rights, that our votes don’t matter, that our lifestyles are invalid. On the catwalk, poached as it is from the system of fashion and launched into a performance context, we get to shout, for all to hear, that we may be brown, and we may be queer. But we are here, we are creative, and we are fabulous.

MADISON MOORE

The Moving Blog

Having A Ball In Berlin

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In February I was invited to be a “celebrity guest judge” at the “Tit Bit Ball” in Berlin, which you might think of as a vogue ball for everyone. The major house in Berlin is the House of Melody, founded by Georgina Leo Melody, an Afro-German girl who learned voguing in New York with the masters of the form. In general the House of Melody is responsible for most of the voguing events in Berlin, though I learned there are other houses and balls throughout Germany, from Dusseldorf to Hamburg.

Whereas the Berlin Voguing Out Festival is remarkable for its extremely high production value, the “Tit Bit Ball,” though no less spectacular, was held at Südblock, a reasonably sized gay and lesbian bar in the center of Kreuzberg. I had been to Südblock before but mostly for drinks or lunch, so the way the space transformed from a café/bar into a cabaret-style performance space was really interesting. Tables were pushed out of the way, a short runway popped up, and a black curtain slide open to reveal the main stage where the judges sat in specially designed chairs for the occasion.

The ball began with a public workshop of the elements of vogue. Anyone could participate. We did a catwalk performance where we were taught the elements of voguing, hand motions and how to position yourself on the catwalk. I was surprised by all the people who participated from the audience, some of them dressed to the nines in crazy looks but who did not necessarily want to compete in the ball itself.

Once the ball began my task as a judge was to evaluate the competitors’ runway performance and the creativity that went into their looks. Judging creativity is a hard task because you want to give everyone an “A” for effort, as the saying goes, while at the same time being discerning. In order to advance to the next round a competitor needed to score a “pass” from all the judges. One single “chop,” or “no,” from one judge meant you couldn’t advance to the next level.

Courtesy of Berlin Voguing Out
Courtesy of Berlin Voguing Out

The performances were beautiful. People of varying levels of expertise competed, and even folks who had not signed up to compete popped out of the audience and took over the catwalk when they felt the urge, often to much applause. There was a competition for designer shoes, for instance, where people from the audience (with no expertise or knowledge of voguing) with the right shoe size did their fiercest runway walks and won the pair of shoes based primarily on audience response.

The most interesting thing I learned about voguing in Berlin is how powerful the culture is for fostering a sense of community and belonging for queer and/or brown people. For some, voguing could be seen as an aesthetic form, a spectacular dance form, full stop. But for the brown and queer bodies who do voguing in Germany, there’s an additional layer of meaning, one centered on the message of self-love invented by ballroom. This is especially relevalatory when thinking about the origins of voguing and ballroom culture as a space created by brown gays and transgender people responding to racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other social exclusions.

MADISON MOORE

Moving Stories

Voguing In Berlin

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During July and part of August I spent a month in Berlin to start a brand new project on the cultural history of Saturday night. It’s no secret to anyone that Berlin is currently one of the world’s hot spots for creative nightlife, where innovation in electronic music meets extensive nights out. I’m always amused when I tell people that my new book project is on club culture because their initial reaction is always something like: “Huh. That’s a topic?”

I’ve wanted to write a book about nightlife culture ever since I taught a self-designed junior seminar at Yale called “Dance Music and Nightlife Culture in New York City” back in 2010. This nightlife book, I imagined, would be a trade book for an informed mass audience about the power of parties and pleasure. The idea for this book came after news coverage of my junior seminar hit the international airwaves and gossip pages, leading some conservative pundits to criticize Yale for allowing me to teach such a course, paving the way for others to criticize me for offering such “nonsense” to Yale undergraduate students. The strand of criticism was so thick that I even received an email from a prominent Yale donor who said “shame on you for bringing Yale’s name into the mud.”

I thought my days as a Yale graduate student were over.

Each time I saw a new critique of the course I grew more and more frustrated because you can learn a great deal about people, time, place, and politics by studying their nightlife cultures. That’s because the history nightlife is always a history of resistance to legal sanctions, a history of musical and artistic innovations, a history of the underground, and a history of self-expression.

This is the anecdotal backdrop that frames my new book project A Cultural History of Saturday Night where I aim to think about why people party and what they seek from Saturday. Of course, a book about Saturday night can’t just be about Saturday, as people party and dance and drink on any night of the week, but there is still something special historically about Saturday. How did Saturday night come to be so special? How are Saturday nights experienced by different people in various parts of the world? How does one place become a nightlife destination over another?

A major draw for me in Berlin was the Berlin Voguing Out Festival, now in it’s second year. The folks behind the Festival are at the razor edge of the voguing scene in Germany, and have done much to introduce the dance form and culture to Berliners. Knowing that Berlin will play a central role in my “Saturday night” book, working on the voguing culture in Berlin as well as the increased internationalization of the black and latino queer culture of voguing is a real opportunity for original research. I have already done some work on the US voguing scenes, but now that I am based in London this is a great opportunity to pivot my focus to the Euro voguing scenes, as to my knowledge there is not very much scholarship being produced on the topic.

The week-long Voguing Festival included a screening of the 2006 film How Do I Look, a more recent portrait of the Ball scene than Paris Is Burning and a talk back with DJ Vjuan Allure, runway coach Archie Burnett, and Berlin-based editor Jan Kedves. The screening took place at a cinema in Mitte and was packed with scholars, voguers, and various people interested in the culture. During the Q+A Archie Burnett talked about learning voguing in New York in Washington Square Park. I remember seeing voguing for the first time in the West Village on Christopher Street and along the Hudson River pier, where underage black teenagers emerged from New Jersey on the PATH train and hung out because they were too young to go to a club.

Today, cupcake shops and bougie candy stores have replaced the saucy gay sex shops and pumping black gay bars that used to line the street. So during the Q+A at the film screening I said that if Archie learned voguing in Washington Square Park and if I saw it on Christopher Street, now that New York is so gentrified what does voguing look like now? Where has it gone now?

Vjuan Allure jumped in immediately. “It looks like this,” pointing back out to the audience and reminding everyone how white the room was – full of young, white hipsters. He didn’t say it was a bad thing; just that this is the way culture always proliferates. He wasn’t at all concerned about the appropriation of the culture, because “by the time you all catch on to voguing, which we have been doing for years, we will have already moved on to the next thing.”

In other words, blackness and queerness are constantly innovating new aesthetic forms.

The festival also included a weeklong series of workshops on voguing, runway, floor performance, old way, and new way. At 25 euros a pop the courses were quite expensive so I was only able to participate in the runway workshop, which was taught by Archie Burnett. Burnett, a legend in the Ball scene, has made a career of traveling around the world and offering similar workshops, particularly in Europe and Eastern Europe.

There were only about 15 people in the workshop, some wearing heels others in more comfortable shoes, six guys (all of us queer) and the rest girls. The point of this particular workshop, as with all the others, was to give people the needed tools to compete successfully at the vogue ball – so they wouldn’t get chopped.

We began by doing our normal walks, from one end of the room towards the mirror. This was the most important task, he told us, because even though a model walk doesn’t seem natural, it should feel natural. We were told to walk like we were in a hurry to meet our friend for a drink. We were told to walk like we were on our way to a hot date. At all times he told us not to walk the way we think models are supposed to walk, and to me this was his way of allowing everyone to tap into their inner confidence.

There was something very empowering about the runway workshop because it was all about having and selling confidence. “Don’t walk to the music, walk to the attitude.” “You’re worth it,” he would say as we walked towards the mirror, and it did actually make you feel worth it and like you had a sense of value. “Own the runway” and “Own it” were his critiques to me during the class, suggesting that I needed to give just a little bit more to fully unlock myself on the runway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8piVGKUhi4

After the group exercise of walking towards the mirror with various scenarios, we did a runway show where each person walked on their own to music to show off what we learned. I’ve never been more nervous than I was then. As much as I like wearing ridiculous clothes and being on display, I actually do not like being on display when I know everyone is watching – especially not when all the lights are on! The same anxiety I have about dancing alone in a drum circle, or in any type of circle, is the same anxiety I had when we had to walk down the runway on our own to “show off our stuff.” But the experience was cathartic in a lot of ways because people cheered you on and the act of walking down the runway did usher in some confidence.

Coming away from the runway seminar really taught me how much voguing and runway work (werk) are about confidence. That much seems obvious, but in fact loving yourself as a black or queer body has a much more pronounced impact when you live in a world that is constantly attempting to devalue your sense of worth. That’s why the incorporation of runways and walking runways and selling looks on the catwalk is such a powerful trope and mode of expression. You’re worth it.

It’s hard to underscore just how white the voguing Ball was. I’ve attended balls in New York, Paris and Washington, D.C. and though there is always a white person or two, balls are mostly full of brown, queer bodies. So it was a real shocker to go to this ball and see how white, and not always queer, the space was. I looked around the room and wondered how many guys were bisexual or gay or queer, if any, and I wondered how many of the girls were lesbian or trans. But it wasn’t just the audience that was 95% white – it was the performers, too, who hailed from Sweden and Italy and Slovakia and Russia.

“I went to my first vogue ball in Paris a few months ago and as soon as I walked in everybody had their arms crossed, like, ‘Who is this white bitch?’, but then when I danced they were more at ease and saw that I was one of them,” Sarah, one voguer told me. The anecdote really gets at the internationalization of the voguing scene, and when I asked her about why the room was so white and straight she told me that a lot of the guy attendees come because they are there supporting their girlfriends, so they might not have any direct connection to queerness or queer culture except this.

Interestingly, the panel of judges, all legends from the New York ball scene, did a lot of work to teach and educate the audience about ball culture. They reminded the room that this is a black queer culture. They did a lot to preserve the culture in terms of specific dance moves and performance categories to insure that the integrity of voguing and ball culture didn’t evaporate, even in its cultural translation. Given how quickly and how expansively voguing has spread around the world I think it’s great to try to preserve the culture, using cultural transmission as a pedagogical tool, too.

MADISON MOORE