Voguing

The dance of ballroom culture: sharp poses inspired by fashion magazines, hands framing the face, spins, dips and floor work, performed in competition.

Voguing is the dance of ballroom: sharp, angular poses, hands that frame the face like a magazine cover, spins, dips and drops to the floor, all hitting the beat. To vogue is to do it, and at a ball it is a competitive category, judged on precision, style and attitude. Done well, it looks like a fashion shoot that turned into a fight and then into a ballet.

It is not the same as just striking a pose on the dance floor, though everyone who has ever done that in a gay club owes it something. Real voguing has rules, styles and a vocabulary, and the best voguers train for years.

Where it comes from

Voguing was born in the Black and Latino ballroom scene of New York. Te Papa's history of ballroom credits Paris Dupree and other Black queens with starting it by imitating the poses of models in Vogue magazine; at first it was called "posing", and only later voguing. The Village Voice adds that the poses were also inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs, and that over the years the dance took on acrobatic and gymnastic moves. The name, of course, comes from the magazine.

Part of its power was that it turned the shade of a ball into movement: instead of insulting a rival, you could out-pose him, right in his face.

Old way, new way, vogue fem

Today there are three main styles:

• Old way: the original, all clean lines, symmetry and poses, closest to the magazine pages.
• New way: sharper and more flexible, with arm control and contortions that look anatomically rude.
• Vogue fem: fluid, dramatic and feminine, built on hand performance, catwalk, duckwalk, spins and dips and floor work.

Madonna and the mainstream

Before Madonna released "Vogue", voguing was already an intricate, highly stylized dance in the underground ballroom scene of Harlem. Her hit and its video, together with the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, carried it around the world, and the ballroom community has had mixed feelings about the borrowing ever since. Today voguing classes run in cities everywhere, and the houses still decide who is a legend.

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