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.”
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