At the time, no drag queen could have imagined that a contemporary dance\/performance show inspired by voguing would ever become a glittering success on the world\u2019s leading stages. Recently, one show, Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church<\/em> by New York choreographer Trajal Harrell, was able to accomplish this unexpected feat. The work (which circulates in several versions) has inflamed large audiences from Montreal\u2019s Place des Arts (where a medium-length version titled (M)<\/em>imosa3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - (M)imosa<\/em> was presented in 2012 at the Cinqui\u00e8me salle de la Place des Arts during the Festival TransAm\u00e9riques (FTA).<\/span> was presented) to the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre national de Chaillot in Paris. Harrell can proudly claim to have fulfilled the ultimate dream of the legends of vogue: to make the City of Lights\u200a\u2014\u200athe cult destination of haute couture\u200a\u2014\u200a\u201cburn\u201d by dazzling it with talent and eccentricity. Watching this excessive, carnivalesque androgynous work is a breathtaking experience. Audience reactions range from roaring laughter to suppressed shouts, but most pay heed to the decorum appropriate to such bastions of the cultural establishment. Through a series of one-(wo)man shows, incredible performers such as Cecilia Bengolea, Fran\u00e7ois Chaignaud, Marlene Monteiro Freitas and Trajal Harrell, attempt to convince the public that they are the real Mimosa<\/em>. Their fervour is as hilarious as it is relentless. By alternating between histrionic dance sequences, romantic songs, tear-jerking narratives, and pageants, they appropriate the identity of an unknown character. Their zeal is the only measure of their authenticity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Voguing has withstood the winds of time to claim its place in the dominant narrative of dance history, which until recently tended to sideline it to the generic category of \u201cthe postmodern.\u201d Harrell\u2019s work (M)imosa<\/em>, subtitled Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church<\/em>, hinges on a hypothetical historical confrontation: what would have happened back in 1963 if black and Latino performers from the vogue scene had befriended the dancers of the Judson Church?4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - See Harrell\u2019s website: http:\/\/betatrajal.org\/home.html.<\/span> The latter, a progressive New York church, opened its doors to a group of postmodern American dancers and choreographers who sought to create works in a collegial manner. Their aim was to democratize the body, to overcome the \u201cfourth wall\u201d of traditional theatre, and to give rein to chance: ultimate liberation for dance from the last shackles of virtuosity, formalism, and institutionalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Paris Is Burning<\/em> references a well-known documentary film by Jennie Livingstone that demystifies the practice of voguing.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - See Jennie Livingstone\u2019s documentary film Paris Is Burning<\/em> (1990). Its title refers to Ren\u00e9 Cl\u00e9ment\u2019s 1966 movie Paris br\u00fble-t-il? <\/em>(Is Paris Burning?)<\/em> which deals with the Franco-American Liberation of Paris.<\/span> The film candidly invites us behind the scenes of the vogue ballrooms and for the very first time affords a voice to the leaders and \u201cchildren\u201d of the most famous vogue \u201chouses\u201d: the House of LaBeija, the House of Xtravaganza, and the House of Ninja. Paris Is Burning<\/em> is both sweet and sour in tone: voguers are cast as both talented, touching artists and excessive characters with irrational aspirations. Creating a sense of unease, the film cruelly foregrounds the social implications of the vogue phenomenon: racism, homophobia, and ghettoization. (M)imosa<\/em>\u2019s corrosive wit barely conceals the bitterness that follows humiliation: the taste for luxury without the means to acquire it, the loss of family values, and excessive spectacle as a means of survival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (M)imosa<\/em> is a futuristic work; it is history gone wild without a conclusive ending. Transposed into the world of vogue, the values of the Judson Church suddenly take on an androgynous aspect, thus keeping the normative at bay. Although Harrell is indebted to postmodernism, he somewhat rebels against it: the over-inflated egos and hyper-visible, frenetic spectacle of (M)imosa<\/em> clash with the \u201cflattened\u201d democratic ethos of postmodernism and its highly conceptual European legacy. In response to Steve Paxton, a key figure of postmodern dance who once stated that \u201cNo one has ever rebelled against us,\u201d Harrell foregrounds the sensational: when dancer Marlene Freitas (who impersonates Prince) bounces off the stage and rides a member of the audience in an offbeat rodeo routine, no one is concerned that the fourth wall has been broached; rather, the audience is fascinated to discover that a \u201cfifth\u201d wall exists: namely, the intimate space of the spectator. Here, masquerade de-territorializes and de-intensifies dance from choreography\u200a\u2014\u200aand, conversely, makes the following questions sound radically sterile: \u201cIs this really dance? Is this really choreography?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the early 1990s, voguing was made famous through Madonna\u2019s song and music video \u201cVogue,\u201d at a time when a new generation of voguers were transforming the style into a dance.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - They were inspired by the spirit of famous dancer Willie Ninja, whose numbers combined poses inspired by magazines, hieroglyphs, and urban dance, among others.<\/span> Since then, vogue is no longer the property of the black and gay countercultural movement. Although it has left the underground, vogue continues to pay tribute to the legends that originally inspired it. Now embraced on every continent, vogue\u2019s modus vivendi still remains the same: to \u201cbe real,\u201d to \u201cgive it all you\u2019ve got,\u201d but above all, to \u201cbecome somebody\u201d while the audience watches on with playful yet critical eyes. For vogue was never merely an extravagant glamour pageant or a masquerade of sequined and heavily made-up bodies: it is a performative ritual in which polymorphous identities are asserted and confronted. Be it in red velvet ballrooms, on the stages of major theatres, or in dance schools in Russia or Japan, vogue now follows an open-ended trajectory, transforming as reluctant purists look on with nostalgia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The rise of gender studies has also contributed to the rapid expansion of voguing. In 1990, American philosopher Judith Butler published Gender <\/em>Trouble7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,<\/em> 2nd ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 1999 [1990]).<\/span>, a work that puts forth a general performative theory of gender in which drag plays a central role. Since then voguing has had paradigmatic value: drag performances challenge the hyper-normativity of heterosexuality, which reduces gender to sexuality by means of a supposedly real and eternal concept of identity. Yet the drag parody shows us that this identity is always one of performance\u200a\u2014\u200ait is a \u201ccontinuous social performance.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Ibid., 180. <\/span> In this vein, voguing thereby becomes the stumbling block of this alienating process of reiteration. It allows \u201cgender configurations [to proliferate] outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality.\u201d9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n As a triumphal expression of the phrase \u201cfake it till you make it,\u201d vogue shows that gender and social roles rely on persuasive mimicry: \u201cIf I dress like a businessman, walk like a businessman and talk like a businessman, then I can be a businessman,\u201d a voguer notes in Paris Is Burning<\/em>. Vogue balls are thus an affair of cosmetic transformation (the word cosmetic stems from the Greek term \u03ba\u03bf\u03c3\u03bc\u03bf\u03c2<\/em> or \u201ccosmos,\u201d which signifies \u201cworld\u201d or \u201cgood order\u201d): artists construct coherent identity-centred microcosms for themselves, small cells of mimicry strikingly framed. New subjectivities emerge and proliferate. Each ball is a competition, a challenge to all performers to faithfully interpret stereotypical roles stemming from approximately thirty categories, which include \u201cthe farmer,\u201d \u201cthe school child,\u201d \u201cthe diva,\u201d \u201csex change,\u201d \u201cmilitary\u201d and \u201cMarilyn Monroe.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - These categories have changed over time. Since 2000, voguers are particularly fond of the category \u201cNew way vogue with dramatics,\u201d which is \u201cvery acrobatic and excessively masculine.\u201d See Guy Trebay, \u201cLegends of the Ball,\u201d The Village Voice<\/em>, January 11, 2000. <\/span> They walk or dance while proudly exhibiting their greatest assets, be it their homemade costume, clean-shaven face, or refined silhouette. As Butler would say, such elements ironically frame those that are \u201cfalsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence.\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Butler, 137.<\/span> The game is deadly serious. The judges are strict and pay heed to every detail (voguers are immediately disqualified if it is discovered that their costumes were stolen), and competition is fierce. \u201cSometimes you feel as if you were in World War Three,\u201d some young voguers have claimed. \u201cHeterosexuals have declared war [on us], and we do battle at the ball.\u201d Is vogue a kind of war that uses other means?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Is vogue really a subversive practice? Does it succeed in undermining gender norms, or is it merely a process wherein such norms are idealized as they are grossly reiterated? Does the continuous creation of subjectivities really have an effect on social objectivity, or does it merely amount to the reification of the latter by absurd means? It bears mentioning that the fairy-tale character of nocturnal balls is like a \u201cla la land\u201d that contrasts sharply with the miserable life conditions of certain voguers.12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - This information comes from Irene Deros, a Montreal-based voguer who studied in New York. Interview with the author, December 10, 2012. <\/span> Today, of course, the situation has improved in comparison to the early 1990s, when young people were often banished from their families after showing the first signs of homosexuality. The vogue \u201chouses\u201d in which such \u201cchildren\u201d were pampered and made ready for the balls more often than not became a voguer\u2019s \u201creal\u201d family home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the best of cases, Butler argues that voguing questions \u201cessentialized\u201d identities. As such, its accomplishments are far from insignificant. Much like other drag practices, voguing reveals that the unity of the monolithic individual, the \u201cself,\u201d is an illusion, and that those who hold on to it are less trustworthy than those who take pleasure in unravelling it. Everyone performs in drag every day. Butler\u2019s thesis recalls an idea put forth by Edgar Morin: \u201cEach one of us is like a vast corridor. Strangers pass through it; we are not within ourselves. Rather, we are beyond ourselves, alienated by our dominant personality and made discontinuous by the various character-roles we play.\u201d13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - Edgar Morin, Le vif du sujet<\/em> (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 157 (Own translation). <\/span> Our imagination, the anchor of our \u201cmask-face, our vocal cords, our body,\u201d14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 14 <\/a> - Ibid., 201. <\/span> is the power that liberates us from our profound inadequacy of being. Embracing a multiplicity of egos, allowing one\u2019s various \u201cdemons\u201d to come forth, and mimicking the fantasies or hyper-normalized character-roles inside us is a healthy way to reinforce one\u2019s metamorphic prowess (poiesis). Are not the rituals of possession a kind of \u201cimitation\u201d of the others that dwell within and that sometimes overpower us?15<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 15 <\/a> - One can think here of the Hauka rituals (in Ghana) presented in the documentary The Mad Masters<\/em> (Les Ma\u00eetres Fous,<\/em> Jean Rouch, 1955).<\/span> Are they not a means to conquer the role played by those who dispossess us of our very selves? Voguing is fierce when it unleashes the \u201cwhirlpool of spirits\u201d that dwell in the \u201cdeep caverns\u201d of the self, a whirlpool of spirits than can at last vogue openly. (M)imosa<\/em> gives centre stage to individuals we have not yet dared to become.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [Translated from the French by Eduardo Ralickas]<\/p>\n(Re)performing History<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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(M)imosa, Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church<\/em>, 2011.
Photo : Paula Court<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/78_DO06_Lavoie-Marcus_Harrell_Mimosa-Twenty-Looks-or-Paris-is-Burning-at-the-Judson-Church-3-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nThe 1990s Troubled by Gender<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
In the Waters of \u201cLa La Land\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n