As witnessed with the recent Sundance of the stunning documentary Kiki, ‘voguing’ is still very much alive and well in N.Y. The outside world first got to know about it back in 1990 with Jenni Livingston’s Paris Is Burning which became the definitive film about the history of ball-culture, but now another ‘new’ record of the burgeoning scene has just been released.
Over the past 30 years Nicolas Jenkins has taken countless hours of footage documenting the voguing ballroom scene and compiled them into an 11-minute short film called “Walk!”
Jenkins told The Huffington Post that he has noticed an explosion of mainstream interest in vogue and ballroom culture over the last several years — something he sees as both a good and a bad thing.
“The Ballroom scene has always been inspiring to me because of the amazing sense of community I witnessed and by the way they celebrated and idolized some of societies most marginalized I personally find the white mainstream LGBT community depressingly very segregated. The LGBT mainstream has much to learn from the ballroom community and needs to see that it is possible to embrace and love each others differences…. But I am [also] concerned that with voguing’s success in crossing over into the mainstream to communities of the ‘non marginalized’ that there is a risk the dance may lose some of its connections to its roots. I’ve been around long enough to watch too many subcultures get absorbed into the mainstream and eventually get commodified.”
