Stage This article is more than 5 years oldSissy Ball: Sydney's queer community of colour celebrates in dizzying style
This article is more than 5 years oldGlamorous vogue ball at the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras can’t be divorced from its political context
In the foyer of Redfern arts centre Carriageworks, it was difficult to tell who was a patron and who was a performer at Australia’s biggest vogue ball, Sissy Ball. Despite the bleak, rainy weather, sartorial maximalism was on full display: there were seas of candy-coloured wigs, towering, thigh-high patent-leather boots, and fishnets from neck down. It was hard to find someone not coated with feathers or sequins or draped in fur.
Sissy Ball, now in its second year as part of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and a coproduction with Red Bull Music, is inspired by the New York Ballroom scene, pioneered by the trans and gay black and Latinx community in Harlem in the 1920s. The scene was the birthplace of vogueing, a dance characterised by its sharp, bold movements, heightened theatricality and emphasis on posing.
In 2019, ballroom and drag culture still thrives in queer communities but has also transformed popular culture. Last year, the television powerhouse Ryan Murphy launched drama series Pose, which chronicles the ball scene in the late 80s. And over the past decade, reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race – which some see as an extension of the ballroom scene – has morphed from cult favourite to cultural phenomenon. Ballroom’s influence on fashion, dance, music and language throughout the decades is expansive and ubiquitous, but it has often been adopted with little or no credit given to its creators.
In ballroom culture, houses compete as teams at balls, but they also exist as a self-determined family unit, led by “mothers” and “fathers” that mentor and provide safe havens for their “children”. Saturday’s event involved battles between Asia-Pacific houses Slé, Luna, IMAN and Amazon, but most of the ball’s commentators (the vogue instructor Dashaun Wesley and the rapper and renowned ballroom MC Precious Ebony), judges (Leiomy Maldonado, often referred to as the “Wonder Woman of vogue”) and DJ MikeQ, were involved in the New York scene.
Before the competition began, the ball’s curator, multidisciplinary artist and mother to House of Slé, Bhenji Ra, reminded the audience that the glamorous art form cannot be divorced from its political context and history. She asked the audience to reckon with the “socio-political bodies” up on stage, who disproportionately face violence, and too often death, due to persecution on the basis of their queer identities. “Give it up for resistance, for virtuosity, for fucking tradition,” she called to the crowd.
First up was the Hands category, in which individual performers sat centre-stage, twirled and twisted their hands at lightning speed, with mechanical precision. “Your hands should tell a story,” explained Precious. Exceptional movements were met with shrieks and cheers from the crowd, who waved auction paddles with the number 10 written on them. The paddles were also used by judges to signal their approval.
Those who lacked finesse or energy were promptly “chopped” from the round of competition, but not without hugs and words of encouragement (“Keep practising honey, try harder next year”). Those who made it through were paired up with a competitor from another house to duel it out until one of them was crowned the category’s grand prize winner.
Competition was often tight, but audience members rarely vocally displayed disapproval of judges’ decisions. Boisterous wolf-whistles, spirited screams and applause echoed throughout the industrial space. It was, as Ra said midway through the night, an event for, and by, the local queer community of colour– linking the audience and performers to an important history of resistance, while at the same time creating a safe, community-led space for affirmation and self-expression.
Throughout the ball, performers posed and cavorted their way across different categories. Face was a celebration of beauty, but one couldn’t solely rest on their physical laurels – “You have to sell it,” Wesley boomed. Runway was all about the contenders’ model walk. The theme was national costume and it felt like a Miss Universe pageant but with far more ingenuity and style, with elaborate ensembles and national flags fashioned into billowing dresses. The category winner, resplendent in a neon yellow skin-tight dress, won the judges and crowd over by powerfully strutting down the runway while pushing a trolley bag and throwing a bouquet of spring onions into the crowd. Sex Siren saw contestants sauntering along in lingerie and barely-there threads of denim, while Female Figure and Vogue Femme required them to dance – and they did, dizzyingly and dramatically.
Audience members were encouraged to enter competition rounds as “rogues” but there were rules, and when some entrants danced around the stage during the runway category, the music was cut and they were booted. “This isn’t lip sync for your life,” said Wesley, the Drag Race reference lapped up by the crowd.
As the show at Carriageworks drew to a close (even though more competition would go on late into the night, at after-hours gay bar The Colombian), Bhenji Ra reminded the audience that this was far from the extent of the ball scene in Sydney. “This doesn’t just happen once a year. We are a living, breathing community of trans women of colour and queer people of colour. You better see it, alright? Come to our balls. Support the girls. We are here. And we’re not going to leave any time soon.”
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