An underground dance phenomenon called voguing has seized Beijing and given China’s LGBT community a “playground.”
Performers in fake fur, mile-high wigs and dramatic makeup pose on a runway powered by a pounding house music soundtrack.
Hundreds of young LGBT Chinese, many traveling from far and wide to attend, packed into the cramped venue for an event on Saturday last week — the first large-scale voguing ball in Beijing.
Photo: AFP
With categories including “Butch Queen Realness,” “Drag Queen Lip Sync” and “Voguing Open To All,” performers battled it out to win the judges’ approval — scoring straight 10s — or were eliminated in cut-throat style.
“It’s a playground for marginalized groups,” said 27-year-old organizer Li Yifan, nicknamed “Bazi,” a pillar of China’s ballroom scene who teaches regular voguing classes in Beijing.
Attendees at a voguing ball feel “a very strong sense of vitality, because a lot of sexual and gender minorities express themselves with a spirit of resistance,” Bazi said.
The highly stylized dance form developed in the 1980s, but traces its roots to early 20th-century New York where an underground ballroom culture blended elements of beauty pageants, modeling and dance contests.
Performers grouped into “houses” with a fierce sense of solidarity, which often became a replacement for the birth families that had ostracized them.
Madonna’s 1990 hit Vogue spotlighted the culture, and voguing is now hugely popular in the West, helped by American TV shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race and Pose.
It traveled to mainland China relatively recently, after making inroads in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong.
It is “a subculture within a subculture,” Bazi said.
However, it is one that is on the verge of going mainstream in China, after emerging out of Shanghai.
“Voguing has really blossomed here in the past two years,” 23-year-old performer Huahua said. “Right now the scene is very young, but it’s also very enthusiastic and passionate.”
Huahua, who competed in long braids and a black cape studded with feathers, started voguing in 2016 and immediately fell in love with its elegant movements, which draw inspiration from Old Hollywood films, haute couture fashion spreads and even ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
“You can express your sexuality, your sensuality,” Huahua said, bending down to pose on the floor, making intricate hand movements. “You’re serving looks on stage like: I’m beautiful and fierce.”
‘SHORTSIGHTED’: Using aid as leverage is punitive, would not be regarded well among Pacific Island nations and would further open the door for China, an academic said New Zealand has suspended millions of dollars in budget funding to the Cook Islands, it said yesterday, as the relationship between the two constitutionally linked countries continues to deteriorate amid the island group’s deepening ties with China. A spokesperson for New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters said in a statement that New Zealand early this month decided to suspend payment of NZ$18.2 million (US$11 million) in core sector support funding for this year and next year as it “relies on a high trust bilateral relationship.” New Zealand and Australia have become increasingly cautious about China’s growing presence in the Pacific
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
ESPIONAGE: The British government’s decision on the proposed embassy hinges on the security of underground data cables, a former diplomat has said A US intervention over China’s proposed new embassy in London has thrown a potential resolution “up in the air,” campaigners have said, amid concerns over the site’s proximity to a sensitive hub of critical communication cables. The furor over a new “super-embassy” on the edge of London’s financial district was reignited last week when the White House said it was “deeply concerned” over potential Chinese access to “the sensitive communications of one of our closest allies.” The Dutch parliament has also raised concerns about Beijing’s ideal location of Royal Mint Court, on the edge of the City of London, which has so
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
RSS