Black femme cares for dance

BY darrell spearman

Black femme cares for dance. I don’t mean “Black femme cares about dance,” but that black femme infuses dance with something otherworldly. This lovingness makes it interesting that the very origin which breathes a specific life into this physical passage is—outside of origin spaces and commercialized spaces that seem to value our intuitivenesses—quite often the butt of someone’s joke.

In the winter of 2023, I was gifted, on two occasions, seats at an Alvin Ailey dance show. It was a pleasure to get to see In a Sentimental Mood, Revelations, and a newer piece by Kyle Abraham: “Are You in Your Feelings?”. Kyle’s piece is fresh, current, and enjoyable in a way where there’s nothing to ponder because the point is visibly there. It’s a beautiful piece about Black relationships, feelings, getting played, playing, and being young. There’s one section in the piece where the men and women part, and on the left side of the stage the guys are dancing in a cluster, together and individually. In a moment, the person on the far right of the cluster drops down into a duckwalk, which is a vogue originated movement. When the piece reaches this moment, the audience laughs. The effervescent chorus of laughter was the response both times I experienced this amazing piece. Whether this part of the dance was intended to stand out as a humorous moment or not, it is obvious that to many audiences outside of Black/POC queer communities, certain facets of femininity showing up through a black male is still seen as humorous, or something to not be taken seriously. Femininity as a whole is something that is often devalued, this we know. Without excluding or devaluing any human experience, my focus in this essay is femininity’s existence within the Black community and in proximity to other communities, and our relationships with dance, and dancing authentically.

Alvin Ailey began his dance company in 1958, with the intention of showcasing strong, exciting, and outstanding Black performances, and because of the time Ailey (the company) was born, masculinity was the main expression of the male dancers on stage. This is interesting because Alvin Ailey was a queer Black man himself. With this awareness, it’s understandable why an element of vogue would be received as a humorous pursuit when it suddenly shows up in an Ailey piece, but does it have to be?

Vogue is a serious dance form. Furthermore, there’s nothing humorous about the foundation of vogue. Vogue was created from a need to survive, resist, grieve, morn, and play; and because it is a feminine experience in many ways, it can be miscounted, almost like the softest color of pink/or the brightest. In “No One Leaves the Stage: An Analysis of How Queer Dance Strengthens Individual Identities and Communal Bonds,” an essay written by Katie Milligan, she says: “Ailey formulated a hyper-masculine performance persona that greatly differed from his authentic self...in 1958, he created Blues Suite....he avoids any movements that could possibly portray homosexuality.” I don’t believe that there is a way to “dance queerly,” and I don’t believe in there being one way to express queerness, however, with there being black queer dancers in the company, the element is still muffled. This may be because Ailey is a Black company that aims to tell black stories, and femininity in black men is something that is (oftentimes) rejected within the black community, let alone society. This goes back to that saying: “You’re black before you’re gay.” It’s amazing that the Black community has this company’s performances to indulge in, but I wonder if all of our stories will be represented

someday. Maybe this moment in Kyle Abraham’s “Are You In Your Feelings?” is a place to imagine how. One day the choice won’t have to be choosing to uphold our Blackness vs our queerness in the arenas of the world that are not necessarily made strictly as a place for us, but that we can all learn to embrace and appreciate each other’s stories and identities. Black LGBTQIA+ youth tend to learn at a very young age how to exist and live as fragmented beings. We read rooms and weave out which parts of us need to be left outside in order to either feel comfortable, or protect other people’s bubbles.

Homosexuality, in the 1950s—around the time Ailey was created—was considered a mental disorder, I recently learned (from Katie Milligan’s writing). This was rendered by the American Psychiatric Association. This makes me think, actually, of the Jim Crow Blackface Illustration which portrays a seemingly Black man with his right hand on his hip, back arched, eyes to the sky. The intent was to portray the Black man as a fool. The Jim Crow character was created by Thomas D. Rice (1808-1860) trying to emulate a Black slave. Mentioning his name feels like a pitiful pursuit, but this is information, I suppose. This is to say that the view of femininity in Black men has stemmed from somewhere that has nothing to do with Black people at all, but like many other issues, has found itself woven, braided, and engrained within our culture. O’Shae Sibley comes to mind here. Known as Sage, he was a black gay dancer who was killed at a gas station in Brooklyn, my native city, where he was seen dancing and putting gas in a car. More than being “the butt of someone’s joke,” we sometimes appear as a threat (to those who reject femininity). This hate crime was announced over social media in summer of 2023, by accounts like Black Boys Dance Too—a source that prioritizes documenting black men in dance without excluding our multifaceted identities, though vogue, specifically, doesn’t seem to be portrayed much from the source’s Instagram account.

In June of 2021, Diego Mugler did an interview with People’s World, in which he discussed his relationship to his femininity, and how long it took for him to embrace himself, and allow the fragments of his being to be the equal parts they are. Diego Mugler was on Season 2 of Legendary, a reality voguing competition series, and a part of the winning House of Mugler. In vogue dance, a House is a group affiliated with competitive performance, also operating as a family unit. The familial/community aspect is the most important element to a House, especially because people who are part of the Black queer and trans community have a long history of needing to find chosen family in the face of the rejection of our identities within our relative units. This isn’t always the case or circumstances faced within our community, but unfortunately often is.

Born as Da’Shawn Woolfolk, Diego Mugler was born in Greensboro, N.C., and began voguing at 15-years-old. He was the oldest of four male siblings and was pretty shy. A friend of his took him to his first ball in Charlotte, N.C. “It wasn’t until recently during the recording of season 2 of Legendary that I became secure with my balance between masculine and feminine energy,” he said in his interview with People’s World in 2021. “I was afraid of being feminine. I just mastered this balancing act at 32 years of age.” He goes on to say, importantly: “The things you may hide from some people are the same things that other people will celebrate and love, so be you and live your truth.” He says this at the end of his interview, when asked to give a message to LGBTQ+ BIPOC youth. Isn’t this the identity struggle? The paradox of existing? On one hand there is potential violence, fear for one’s life, past experiences that breed internalized fear, yet there are people and places who need you to be you.

Milligan, as I stated before, mentioned authenticity in her writing, referring to Ailey’s persona and how his stage presence differed from his “true self.” I combat this statement by saying that we are made of many things and don’t necessarily have just one aspect of ourselves that is true, especially as Black LGBTQIA+ people. As one of my favorite authors, Vivek Shraya (a Brown transgender woman/pop star/author/teacher), says in her book People Change, we are many things. However, we sometimes withhold some of our parts with the true knowledge that some of our parts may not be accepted, and that is because they once were not. So what encourages authenticity? The guarantee of safety. This is why the community aspect of Vogue is crucial and vital for Black queer and trans identities. Where else would one go? And as the moment in Kyle Abraham’s dance piece occurs, the dancer who drops down into a duck walk does it in a reluctant way (I hope my memory serves me well here), as if testing the waters. It’s okay if I’m “reaching” here. I don’t mind.

In an essay I wrote in 2022 titled “Love and Identity (or Just Love),” I wrote about some of the ways in which my femininity has felt muffled and hard to access when in public settings, or at least to the degree of which it exists in my spirt. Sometimes it’s as if I can feel what I hide. I spoke openly about the things my one and only effeminate male cousin and I had experienced growing up and the effects of the bullying and shaming for our natural personalities in this life of mine, and definitely not without hope for positive evolution. I speak on the importance of having people who reflect, naturally, your identity back to you in a way that is authentic to all of you as individuals (not forced or pretentious). “...as my cousin and I began to grow in size, their hazing began to grow larger than we could bear. We were verbally humiliated and shamed in front of our entire family, often, and no one would defend us. Our authentic movements and mannerisms were criticized and picked apart, and eventually, I did not know who to be when they were around. I felt like a frozen entity in their presence.” This isn’t only a part of my story, but a part of most people’s stories. When I first saw the image of the Jim Crow character, I thought immediately of my childhood, and how I knew way too soon in life that the expression of femininity within people who look like me was a big risk, and could make a target of me. Luckily, I’ve been met with people in life who challenge this perspective, and encourage me to be me. Like Diego Mugler, it’s happening in spurts for me. Who I was in high school is not who I am now, and this is to be credited to grace and the people in my life’s grace for me/my grace for myself. This is to be credited to authors like Tarell Alvin McCraney, Dean Atta, Mark Oshiri, and Jericho Brown. I took my first vogue class in the summer of 2021, which was taught by Malik Mugler (who is also a part of the winning House of Mugler in Season 2 of legendary), at The Door in NYC. I was able to feel more like myself because of the spiritual pathways vogue opens up for people. The form is meant to do so, and it’s inevitable that, eventually, you loosen.

The second time I experienced a Vogue class was in the Spring of 2023 at The University of the Arts. The class was taught by Uwazi Zamani—also a Black queer performer, pedagogy, and researcher of Black queer/trans life & afterlife. I remember the first time we went through the element of hand gestures. I was enamored by the way the limp wrist is used as power in performance in Vogue. A limp wrist is one of the ways in which many people within the black community mock their queer Brothers, uncles, cousins, friends. Coming to learn that it is powerful and a crucial element of a dance form was a re・minder that when someone learns the wrong thing from the right people too soon in life, it can be very detrimental. However, people like Malik Mugler, Uwazi Zamani, and every Black queer or transgender person who spreads the knowledge of Vogue are vital in the undoing of the original disruptive teachings that condition people to believe that Black femme is anything other than extremely valuable (and also should be able to just be/exist).

Recently, I saw footage of a Vogue ball happening in a school gym. Forgive me for lack of names of the queens and of source. In the video, there were three queens starting in a play pin and they each came out to dance along the runway, which was a stage built into the gym. When watching the footage, you don’t think to look at the background or the small details of setting, because we focus on the queens and other dancers immersing themselves in their storytelling, and school gyms are usually used for events. However, seeing the basketball hoops in the back struck me. I felt glad. Glad that balls take place in a setting that is usually considered a very masculine environment, and is expected to be. The space was pumping with music, and penetrated with BIPOC transgender expressivity. I was enamored.

What happens when a ball takes place on a basketball court?/When a person who knew the limp wrist to be weaponized against them learns to use it as their own weapon?/When a duckwalk shows up in a dance company that may have sacrificed representing all Black stories to expand? I believe it opens crevices and slightly shifts veils, which hopefully one day won’t have to exist.

Works Cited

“Are You in Your Feelings?” Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, 18 Jan. 2024, www.alvinailey.org/performances/repertory/are-you-your-feelings.

Jim Crow - Digital File from Original Item | Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/resource/ds.00886/. Accessed 3 May 2024.

Lynch, Maicol David. “Being Black and Gay in the USA: Interview with Dancer Diego Mugler.” People’s World, 30 June 2021, www.peoplesworld.org/article/being-black-and-gay-in-the-usa-interview-with-dancer -diego-mugler/.

Milligan, Katie. No One Leaves the Stage: An Analysis of How Queer Dance ..., May 2022, aquila.usm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1840&context=honors_theses.

Rodriguez, Mathew. “O’Shae Sibley, a Beloved Dancer, Killed after Vogueing at Brooklyn Gas Station.” Them, Them., 1 Aug. 2023, www.them.us/story/oshea-sibley-black-gay-man-dancer-stabbed.

Spearman, Darrell. “Love and Identity (or Just Love).” DARRELLSPEARMAN.ART, Spring 2023, www.darrellspearman.art/love-and-identity-or-just-love.