Voguing and house music’s politically radical past

(M)imosa, which forms part of Episode 5: Hidden in Plain Sight

YOU think you understand voguing. You’re thinking of Madonna, pouting and striking poses into her Vaseline-smeared lens, surrounded by handsome, rich looking young men. You’re thinking of a litany of dead white movie stars: Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe. You’re thinking it makes no difference if you’re black or white, if you’re a boy or a girl. You’re wrong.

“It totally makes a difference if you’re black or white, a boy or a girl,” says Barry Esson, artistic director of Arika. “That’s the social reality voguing came from: a Latina/black/transgender/queer/biracial/intersex community, living in relative poverty in Harlem, with the highest rate of HIV infection in the developed world. Of course it makes a difference.”

Esson is quoting deep house DJ and transgender theorist Terre Thaemlitz, who will be visiting Scotland this weekend. He’s talking about the voguing movement that grew out of the ballroom culture of Harlem from the 1960s onswards, where to vogue isn’t just a hand gesture from a 1980s pop video, but a form of cultural expression that allows its participants to strike the poses and assume the personas of social groups they aren’t allowed into. The closer they get to “passing” in their chosen drag identity, the greater their “realness”.

“Terre says that the problem with Madonna’s Vogue is not that it’s inauthentic, which it is, but that the terms of discourse are misrepresented – she doesn’t make clear where she’s taken it from,” says Esson. “She erases the very context of Latina, African-American queer and transgender culture that created voguing. I imagine most people reading this would be aware of the dance style voguing because of Madonna, but it’s not a great entry point. Voguing isn’t some sort of empty, aesthetic pop thing. It’s a deep bodily response, a community’s politics, a decision they have made about how they want to represent themselves, how they want to communicate their situation, and how they see themselves in relation to each other.”

Esson is talking to me ahead of Episode 5: Hidden In Plain Sight, the fifth of his ongoing small festival series merging performance and theory. Where early last year Episodes 1, 2 and 3 focused sharply on ideas like nihilism or specific art forms such as experimental artist films, this year the festivals seem to have evolved into something else.

Last month’s Episode 4 looked at radical black art forms like free jazz, and how they gave expression to the politics of that movement. Episode 5 offers a way to explore the link between exuberant, flamboyant queer, gay, lesbian, trans and  bi artforms like lipsync, drag, deep house music and, yes, voguing, and the politics of race, class, gender and sexuality that run through them. It’s all dramatically different from Instal, Arika’s renowned, long-running and often solemn experimental music festival.

“These Episodes have developed, yeah,” says Esson. “Sometimes I think they’re like a magazine or a salon where you can talk about a topic, discuss and think about why things are being done, but then also spend time with the performances, experiencing those things. And both are as important as the other. Here’s the biggest change for Arika: my background is avant garde and experimental music. I probably gave up on free jazz, and house music, a long time ago. Then I met people from those communities and began to realise the connection between the politics and the artistic expression. House music, as it grew up in queer communities and in the clubs, is as politically radical and transformative, possibly even more so, than any kind of European avant garde music I might have been into in the past.”

So at Episode 5, you’ll encounter the black, trans performance artist boychild, whose work mixes drag and lipsync with Japanese Butoh, by way of a pitch-shifted Rhianna; you can lose yourself at a house night presided over by Thaemlitz’ alter-ego DJ Sprinkles, and watch genuine ballroom voguing legends in action.

However, this is all set against a series of talks and debates offering context, history and theorising. The idea of carving a place for these art forms, their meanings and influences within history is present here, too.

One of the most exciting participants at Episode 5, the choreographer Trajal Harrell, has created a series of works under the umbrella title Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning At The Judson Church, ranged in size from (XS) to (L). All the pieces approach the same question: what if one of those voguing drag performers from Harlem travelled to Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village – a Mecca for the 1960s postmodern dance scene – and performed alongside the (largely white and middle or upper-class) founders of American contemporary dance?

“When I first went to a voguing ball, I realised that what they were doing was just as postmodern as the Judson Church aesthetic,” says Harrell. “Voguing examines discourse around social roles and democracy, and ‘realness’; the Judson movement tried to do that with this idea of ‘authenticity’.” Harrell is at pains to point out that although people tend to stereotype him as an African American queer performer and assume he belongs to the voguing tradition, he’s actually from the rather more privileged world of contemporary dance and can’t presume to speak for that community. In fact, a recent Huffington Post profile proclaimed him as “the next Martha Graham”.

“That’s what’s interesting about bringing these two things together – both of these dance movements were creating strategies to reflect upon the shifting potential of democracy in the 1960s. Two different cultures approaching the same idea, but clearly one has been included in official histories and the other has not.”

The two pieces Harrell will show at Episode 5 – his solo (S) and the collaborative piece (M)imosa – use different facets of the ballroom tradition, from the assumption of roles in pursuit of “realness” to the exuberant pageant of a lipsync drag act, to examine how this evolving entertainment comments on the world around it.

“Sure, voguing is an amazing spectacle, of course; it has this vibrancy,” Harrell says. “But I really wanted to look at its theoretical impulses. Voguing reveals those roles we might believe are socially prescribed to be just another fiction: if, through ‘realness’, I can come very close to passing as you, I’m asserting that we should both have that right. But at the same time, this process highlights how far apart we are in terms of our class and our race and our sexuality. It’s complex, what they’re doing, and it’s startling.” So very, very much more complex than a three-minute pop song.

• Arika’s Episode 5: Hidden in Plain Sight is at Tramway, Glasgow, tomorrow until 26 May. www.arika.org.uk