November 27th, 2017-- Blessings

It is another Monday, and I have have been very angry and overly confused at the fact that I have so much to do, and I am pretty sure it is impossible for me to do all the things that I need to do.. this comes from multiple levels of abuse coming my way, and and lack of support, due to graduate school, and myself, coming from a limited resource family. But more, I find myself wondering, and wondering, where should I go? What should I do? Why am I not having fun like other gays my age... I see so many of my friends having fun on weekends, while I continue to work, thinking that it is fun-relaxing research, but indeed, it is work beyond work beyond work. Many times I want to be something else, like a cute little guy that richer bigger guys take care of..... but that leads to levels of slavery and lost of personhood I cannot stand.
And so what?
I have learned that I yearn for that which I do not have. and because of that, I cannot have anything. More I am in bad mood, because I started in a place of loss, negativity, and desolation. And so, instead of that, I will focus on what makes me great, and happy.

I am so thankful that I have so many friends around the world. More I am so happy to be a part of the House of Lauren. They have been more than generous with their support of my research, and I am so happy that they love me and my work enough to support my continuance with it. I am thankful that I have a good chair and good advisors that try hard to support me. And I am thankful that I can reflect and express. At the end of the day, I love expressing myself, I love feeling myself, and I love being catalytic.

Perhaps that is who I am,
Cuauhtémoc Peranda
Father Dante Ome'Lauren
The Poet, Scholar, Dancer, Educator
The Glitter Shaman
The Catalysis

and I am thankful that I can redefine myself everyday!

Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Happy Birthday, I love you

“The vision of radical Third World Feminism necessitates our willingness to work with those people who would feel at home in El Mundo Zurdo, the left-handed world: the colored, the queer, the poor, the female, the physically challenged. From our blood and spirit connections with these groups, we women on the bottom throughout the world can form an international feminism. For separatism by race, nation, or gender will not do the trick of revolution. Autonomy, however, is not separatism. We recognize the right and necessity of colonized peoples throughout the world, including Third World women in the U.S., forming independent movements toward self-government. But ultimately, we must struggle together. Together we form a vision which spans from the self-love of our colored skins, to the respect of our foremothers who kept the embers of revolution burning, to our reverence for the trees – the final reminder of our rightful place on this planet. The change evoked on these pages is material as well as psychic. Change requires a lot of heat. It requires both the alchemist and the welder, the magician and the laborer, the witch and the warrior, the myth-smasher and the myth-maker. Hand in Hand, we brew and forge a revolution.”

 

--Gloria E. Anzaldúa, El Mundo Zurdo: The Vision

But is that a real story?

Cuauhtémoc: I'm really interested in 'what is a story? And, what qualifies a story, or storytelling, to be truth, or understood as history?'

The Glitter Shaman: Bitch! Even creation stories have creation stories!

Grandma Azúcar: I think what the Shaman was expressing, was the frustration we students have been having with "the school." Mi hij@z think truth es qué something we have not fabricated--but all receipts are recorded, made, reproduced, and stored, through some pinche flawed human methodologies. And, they always require careful translation and transcription in order to be shared. See mijo, I think your task isn't about truth at all, but a praxis of navigating dancing storytelling to produce transcriptions that are meaningful to those who are in need of that navigated knowledge, but do not have resources, honors, and credentials necessary to access the resources you so easily browse... También, be careful of your privileges mija...

The Glitter Shaman: Facts and alternative facts (lies), are all discourse, and are all chisme--and it all is glitter! It is important to acknowledge the creative bias that exists in all creation, but it is also gloriously necessary that you honor the differentiations and disidentifications in glitter.

Cuauhtémoc: Its like what a daughter of the Kiki House of Mona Lisa affirmed with me at the ball, "realness is first, everything starts with realness."

Sweaty Hugs are Necessary in Extreme Heat

It was quite chilly last night. And today, I awoke refreshed! More, I seem to have regained much of the clairvoyance I had lost to confusion, and thus lamented all through the weekend for its return. It is something, a heavy something, to know that heat affect me so much. And, it's not an issue of having A/C, but more an issue of needing to be outdoors, and do work, without dripping into the hungry earth, or the sensitive laptop. The heat seems to compound anxieties, forcing fragility in action, leading to inaction, frustration, and morose contemplation. Such a process, so dire and deep, is hard to escape. Yet, somehow, acceptance of the grossness of it all, is how I made it through my time in a 2009 Northwestern Summer; and with the wisdom of contact improv (in all its sharing of sweat), I have found hugs to be the medicine I need to jolt me back from linear destruction. Of course, cool weather, mist, and Karl the Fog, always seem to do the trick as well.
#PhDLife

You are not a failure

"Yes son, I see you are in a rough spot.

But, what has voguing taught you?

You are not a failure! How could you be?

Failure is but a poison of the white man to make you lessor.

To tell you, and make you believe, that your black skin is a failure to be white.

To force you to forget the erudite brilliance that is your African heritage.

To force me to die and my blood become the salt of the earth of the reservation.

No my son, we do not have to drink or smoke the white man's poison.

No my son, you are not a failure.

What has voguing taught you?

What has vogue taught you?

WE. DO. NOT. DIE!

We do not dive to our death.

We but dip.

We but dip and bounce back.

What they have called the death drop is but a dip into hell to return with the grace and resilience of the divine.

What they have called the death drop is but a minor dip into hell, with a promise to return to strike and fly!

We are voguers.

We are voguers.

WE. ARE. VOGUERS!

We know how to die and come back to life.

We know how to be asleep and woke.

You are not a failure.

You are not failing.

You are but dipping."

A message from The Glitter Shaman

Translated by P. Dante Cuauhtemoc Ome'Lauren

Queer Indigenous Vogue, Realness, and Fierceness: Dancing our selected kinships, and our resilience into being.

As a Ph.D. student, our research is who we are and what we are. For the time we are in the program, our research focus defines us--because it is not only our work, but how we work, what interests us, and predicts what our future can be. Here is a current snapshot, a current focus, of my research: 

Dissertation Abstract:

Queer Indigenous Vogue, Realness, and Fierceness: 

Dancing our selected kinships, and our resilience into being. 

My dissertation will focus on how Native Americans of the Western Hemisphere have deployed the dance form of vogue (voguing) as a method of decolonization, anti-colonialism, and resilience. Though the dance form of vogue was founded and stewarded by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Black and Latinx communities, I have observed Native Americans using the form to create their own kinships, as well as form political-artistic alliances with other queer peoples of color. My project will be to examine how queer Indigenous peoples, often self-called Two-Spirit (2S, 2spirit) people, have created their own families, kinship networks, and ceremonies (often due to being ostracized from their tribal communities, because of their sexual orientation or identity). Though in the past, some tribes revered 2spirit people, the project of British and Spanish imperial colonialism’s “heteronormative patriarchy” destroyed this cultural value for some tribes –which in turn has led to the extreme general mistreatment of LGBTQ2S peoples. Seeking family, and ways to offer their love, talents, and life, some Two-Spirit peoples have entered the spheres of “Imperial Drag Councils” (private societies in charge of drag balls and gay neighborhood cultural affairs), created “Two-Spirit Powwows”, and participated in “The Ballroom Scene” (where voguing is stewarded). Today, throughout the Western Hemisphere, Native American 2spirit people vogue to celebrate and openly proclaim both their queerness and the indigenous ancestry, while simultaneously protesting imperial heteronormative patriarchy.

In this project, I will focus on the Indigenous voguers (who I know personally and meet with often through the ballroom scene) of Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and Mexico. My informants will include, but are not limited to: Omar Apocalipstic (Huichol), Sissy Prolific (Paiute), Legendary Overall Mother Amazon Leiomy (Taino), Waawaate Fobister (Anishinaabe), Felipe Rose (Lakota Sioux), and Landa Lakes (Chickasaw). To investigate how Native American LGBTQ2S are using vogue, and its ballroom scene, to create their own Indigenous kinship networks, I will conduct an intimate ethnography—which I define as a conglomeration of interviews and face-to-face participatory engagements to produce personal oral histories as evidence of vogue practice. To move deeper, and examine how Indigenous vogue produces new interpretations of “authentic American Indian” identity using drag and realness, I also plan to participate in vogue balls and 2spirit Powwows, to produce and analyze self-reflections, and conduct choreographic analysis of vogue performances. I will showcase, through digital ethnography, how 2spirit peoples use social media to create and sustain kinship networks. With review of queer history and 2spriti literature, I will better situate contemporary dance practices of 2spirit peoples, and how they have sustained their communities, and lives, through the continual project of colonialism. Lastly, I will demonstrate what forms of medicine vogue has produced through its gift of uniting LGBTQ2S American Indian peoples, and through its establishment of queer coalitions of color.

To date there are less than fifteen academic works that address voguing, and there are less than two articles that look at this culture and its ideologies from the lens of Indigenous studies. Little work on Indigenous dance directly address its efforts and struggle of queer coalition of color community building. Thus, this project expands on the work of these fields in by challenging, though synthesis, the borders of these fields of study that have been previously been established as discrete. In this unique way, I build on the generous and growing trend to recognize and remember the work of 2spirit people in sustaining the resilience of both their Indigenous communities, and the broader LGBTQ2S communities.

THINGS TO REMEMBER WHEN RESISTING THE 45TH

THINGS TO REMEMBER WHEN RESISTING THE 45TH

1. Don't use his name;
2. Remember this is a regime and he's not acting alone;
3. Do not argue with those who support him--it doesn't work;
4. Focus on his policies, not his orange-ness and mental state;
5. Keep your message positive; they want the country to be angry and fearful because this is the soil from which their darkest policies will grow;
6. No more helpless/hopeless talk;
7. Support artists and the arts;
8. Be careful not to spread fake news. Check it;
9. Take care of yourselves; and
10. Resist!

Keep demonstrations peaceful. In the words of John Lennon, "When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you - pull your beard, flick your face - to make you fight! Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor."

And most important--When you post or talk about him, don't assign his actions to him, assign them to "The Republican Administration," or "The Republicans." This will have several effects: the Republican legislators will either have to take responsibility for their association with him or stand up for what some of them don't like; he will not get the focus of attention he craves; Republican representatives will become very concerned about their re-elections.

(Copy to paste to your wall - blog - print and paste on a wall - e-mail to that bitch suzy who gonna help the revolution, with breakfast)

A glace of the sisters Performance & Pedagogy, Part 2, Aleta Hayes

this text is still in process & is only a draft of what I hope is something publishable

Aleta Hayes  

When selecting artists to help her create, organize, and produce The Chocolate Heads, which is another version of a dance/art/music company, Stanford’s professor of the arts of dance and theatre, Aleta Hayes, found only the best! She had cultivated a sophisticated sensibility to detect originality in potential. Anyone she asked to join her in an artistic creation was offer that opportunity because Aleta had witness, heard, or felt a connection to something deeply creative and unique within them. She was a seer of what the American Imperialism has forced us to ignore into blindness: non-translatable creative and expressive brilliance.

As an academic, one of my responsibilities is to make the knowledge that I explore, accessible to my readers. Now, generally speaking, my readers are my peers, in class, and in the field of dance studies--so, my writing attempt to speak with the eloquence expected of me in those spaces, which is esoteric and exclusionary with its inherent University educational privilege. Well, Aleta had none of that. But don’t get it twisted, she had other things to do and say in academe. For instance, she understood dance to, yes, not be within the translatable rage of most languages outside of dance--but, that did not mean we couldn’t be creative with also our redistribution of knowledge kept in each dance. And so she spoke about her work, wrote about, had other comment, had other write about it, cultivated conversations, cultivated exchanges, and has shared her work with as many people and organizations globally. For her, the effort, commitment, and responsibility of sharing your work, the work of dance: kinetic-cultural research, was primary and necessary. From children to elders, she found new ways of presenting her new research in new combinations for the new people in her life. To begin fresh, always forced our work to be fresh and challenging.

As I myself have journeyed through the process of being her student, to her apprentice, to her assistant, and then to currently her peer, I have made many observations of her unique way of teaching and composing works-of-art. One such observation was her ability of performing pedagogy.

While performance is often seen a farce, an illusion, built for pure entertainment, and nothing more, as artists and scholars of the arts, we know there is so much more, and that this kind of labeling of performance is propagated in order to diminish the powers of the arts. Sometimes work is so good, you cannot help to bear witness and cry--which was one of her goals: to make the audience cry. This idea of crying, as a way to express how impactful the work was on the witness, was the evidence of success upon which Aleta’s bravery was predicated upon. She created life changing work--the works, and she herself, are being of greatness. And thus, to her credit, these achievements were attained because she was always performing and choreographing everything in her life, including pedagogy.       

Considered the methodology and praxis of transmitting and evaluating knowledge integration in a learner: teaching, and its overarching concept or pedagogy, is one of the most sacred practices of a human right we know of today. And, then here in the United States, we are mostly without a National rigorous and effective pedagogy standard. There is a lack of a necessary focus, and need of a National Standards and Expectations of Dance Literacy, Choreographic Tools, Performing Effectively, etc...Though there are somes standards for dance, most of these standards are not at all robust or current. Only through NGO’s, such as Luna Dance Institute in Berkeley, California (Luna), are there people arguing for requiring and standardizing dance expectations; and then also Luna teaches, trains, and shares all that they know. To me Luna Dance Institute embodies a commitment dance education back into the lives of the children, thus restoring our future.   

While Luna may be a collective in resistance to the erasure of the knowledges of dance, Aleta Performs Pedagogy. As she moves, dances, speaks, listens, watches, sing, composes lesson plans, prepares marketing, warms-up dancers, and fierces asks for only the most full and lush 100% effort to ever be executed in her work, I had discovered, in real flesh and life, the answers to poor and outdated evaluation systems. Standardized test do nothing but make you feel bad, hopefully bad and scared enough that you never resist “authority”. But, having high expectations, and demanding more effort, and supporting new ways of thinking and finding solutions, produces a product, which are often records of effort and concepts practice, if not also integrated in the student, via notes, final choreographic performances, and artists statements. There was no need for a grade scale for Aleta, for that outdated practice uses up too much work-time in a life--where, for most, time is not in any sort of adequate abundance. Her way of enacting and producing evaluations was to use her skills and senses (her embodied self, as almost a gradebook), in combination with final performances and notes and reflections, to produce a personal and effective final comments/grade/suggestions/indications of brilliance/indications of a need for deep reconsiderations/mindful love. For her, the work itself was the grade, and everything that follows are new creative retellings of that process and experience.

At the level of the lesson plan, the educational unit arch, the expected learning outcomes, the dance techniques, the choreographic process, the body, and classroom management, for Aleta, they were all opportunities for performance, and they existed within the domain of performance. Each of these basic needs in teaching could be performances, could be choreographed. Each of these could be treated as, or processed like, a score found in Anna Halprin’s RSVP Cycle practices. But beyond just enacting a lesson, and for an hour, following agenda items as the way to attain knowledge, Aleta was much more interested in the playful investigation for one’s fierce self (fierceness), and next, a consistent and sustainable praxis of the cultivation of said fierceness. Aleta was completely uninterested in dancing produced a nice show that was interesting. Aleta wanted excellence, which often meant, creating a new kind of vision of, for, instead of, for replacement of the world. In challenging every “rule” of art, she found opportunities for fierceness, like dancing next to many 6 million dollar+ paintings, like making a dance work in an old, very used, workshop, like bringing dance to the Stanford’s TEDx stage as a proclamation of dance being not only a practice of research, but a also the presentation of findings, and the finding themselves. Through her body, she could read the room, read the expectations, read the curricula, and catalyze it all into motivational dance directions, which infectiously inspired everyone around her, to find their fierceness, and bring it out.         

To perform is to enact, to give life to something that is still. That is what it takes to read a script of a play. A play, is just a book, a list of words, that can be read, and in the imagination, made into a cognitive production, but it take the whole body, the whole person, to enact a play, to perform words into something passionately executed, authentic, and convincing. But most importantly, every creation, rehearsal, and recital of the play will be different. And this was Aleta’s approach to teaching, pedagogy, directing, leadership, and being creative. Pedagogy was a script to be performed. A script that can be edited, devised, thrown away, recreated, and reenacted in new ways, in new fierceness, every time. She, like this practice, as adaptive, and dynamic. With this approach to teaching, she had taught me that it is really easy to teach anyone, because what you build within a performance of pedagogy, is an improvisation of a lesson, and is now built out of an interaction with another person spontaneously and presently, rather than prescribing a lesson onto a person and “hoping to Dear God” everything will somehow stick, everything will work out. People are not machines, they are dynamic being weaving existence with you, a single “industrialized” model of pedagogy has proven ineffective over and over again. This, her more adaptive mode-model of performing pedagogy, is what is needed in this contemporary age of instant access to all information via the internet through our text messenger machines. As teachers, we must be well rehearsed to use all tools around us, in our present day quotidian performances, to main stage productions, and to community ritual ceremonies, to ensure the proper preparation of our students to learn with us, and then for themselves.

It was through Aleta’s way of teaching, her performing pedagogy, that I was enabled to become one of the best dance improvisers of the Bay Area, and currently quite a successful artist-scholar, voguer-ethnographer. In following her ways of teaching, I have been able to teach peoples of all ages, sizes, experiences, abilities, background, and cultures. She taught me not only how to be proactive and cutting-edge with anything that I do, but also how to “sniff out talent”, how to find those who are open to attempting the impossible. Because that was it for her: That was the pursuit that yielded everything, the impossible task of attempting the impossible, reveals and produces what is newly possible, while also filtering out what has already been done. As I continue to improvisationally choreograph my life and work, I sleep comfortably. I know that that performing pedagogy is not only a special gift that can be empowered by dreams, but that also performing pedagogy keep my teaching and interactions with my students honest and fresh. From reading curricula, to bodies, to articles, to vogue, and then treating those things and people, like a script from a playwright for a director to organize a performance of sunbathing or creating a daily realness performance of being a student, this praxis of Performing Pedagogy keep sending me to where I need to be.  

Vogue Femme: Trans* Blaqtin@ Adventures

UCR Spring 2017

Dance 005: Introduction to Dance

“Vogue Femme: Trans* Blaqtin@ Adventures”

with (Cuauhtémoc Peranda) Overall Prince Dante Lauren Tan Chichimeca

Section 008: Monday/Wednesday @5:10-6:30pm

Section 011: Tuesday/Thursday @9:40-11:00am

Vogue, Voguing, Performance, or Presentation, is a dance form that comes out of the New York City underground Black & Latinx ballroom scene culture of drag, runway walking, fashion, and body realness. Since the mid-1980’s, vogue has spread throughout the United States, and internationally to Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Italy, Canada, Japan, France, Jamaica, Spain and Russia. Though its popularity/notoriety in popular culture ebbs and flows, it remains a treasured means of communication, empowerment, expression and unity for Queer and Transgender People of Color who stewart the ballroom scene’s balls (pageantry competitions). This quarter, the course will focus on Vogue Femme, currently one of the most popular techniques of vogue, which was born in the 1990’s out of the Transgender Latina ballroom scene children, who needed a dance style that was more feminine, and less masculine, than the earlier techniques of Vogue Old Way, or New Way Vogue. With Vogue Femme, we will explore the embodied knowledge kept in the techniques of vogue, to get a taste for the Trans*Latinidad deep in the kinesthesia and rhythms of the dance. By the review and werk of the FIVE ELEMENTS OF VOGUE, we will build our confidence and body strength, break a sweat, learn fabulous choreography, and create our own personal-expressive dance phrases to whip out whenever we feel a beat! We will have fun! We will get strong! And we will be Fierce! “THE TEA WILL BE SERVED HOT AND SWEET!”

Cuauhtémoc Peranda, A.K.A. Overall Prince Dante Lauren Tan Chichimeca, M.F.A., (Mescalero Apache/Mexica- Chichimeca) is a two-spirit butch queen voguer from the Iconic House of Lauren, International. He has been voguing since 2008, and has choreographed vogue for his own projects and for professional dance companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has had the pleasure to learn voguing from the House of Avant-Garde's School of Opulence in Chicago, and now continues his vogue research and teaching as the Principal Investigator of the Chichimeca Vogue Lab at the University of California at Riverside's Ph.D. program in Critical Dance Studies. He has performed throughout California, and has presented dance work in New York, Seattle, London, Honolulu, Berlin, Cambridge, and Tijuana. He is graduate of the dance program at Stanford University, and has received his MFA in choreography ​and performance ​from Mills College.

The Queen call it Reading

The Queens call it Reading

Intimately Penetrating into the Ineffable Choreographic Improvisations of Vogue

In “Improvisation in African-American Vernacular Dancing”, Cleis Albeni makes the argument for looking at improvisation, as choreography. This claim sets in motion the precedent to examine not only how dance studies examines and valuates the composition of dance, but also how dance composes its subject matter—how that subject matter is danced. This original research paper seeks to examine how dance composes the subject matter of the voguer. More specifically, the contemporary practice of voguing will be investigated as a discursive cluster of knowledge which theorizes and produces in its dancing how gender and desire can be not only represented through this improvisational technique, but also makes a claim that gender and desire are compositions in lived experience. By also looking at voguing as a dance practice embodying the Black Radical Tradition, this paper will make the case for voguing as a resistive and disruptive practice to western European thought and ordered.



The Queens call it Reading: Intimately Penetrating into the Ineffable Choreographic Improvisations of Vogue... by Prince Cuauhtii Lauren Chichimeca on Scribd

Prayer for the Boo

Prayer for the Boo

by P. Dante Cuauhtémoc 

Dear Boo
My love of the night
in a phone call I hear such fright
of
The Future.
As uncertain as the moon's sight
forever biting at our love
coaxing us to bear that soul
that melts us
feeds us
bind us
and for now, has kept us apart.

Dear Boo
I miss the intensity of your noes,
nestled up against your sweet eyes
beside calming cheeks
I miss it because
those nose boo kisses helps us feel
both
grounded
and in outer space
where no boo has gone before.

Looking at our future,
and all its possibilities
knowing too well the past
I stop
I pray
I will not go back to the day
of being frozen
in the great unknown...

"...must trust the unknown"

Jomama Jones once said:
"Life is Motion, Life is Motion, Life is Motion!",
and I believe her.

As long as we keep dancing
as we know we want to
the moon's bite, reminds us
it is only the pinch
for us to yell AYE!
and LET'S GO!
and be the peaceful, happy, and good boos,
like
I know, we are.

Grad school is hard...

Grad School is hard…

by Cuauhtémoc Peranda 

Grad School is hard.

I cope by being extra

Extra Joy, Extra dancing, Extra Tacos...

They help me rise

When all I want to do is crumble and fall

Down down

Temoc

To fall, to descend...

I lost the message I was supposed to send...

No.

Yes.

?Yas?

YAASSS!!!

With that Triple "S"

For that triple "D"

Come to me!

Taste this

Taco.

Y se llama paco.

I love you extra big

Mis amores son largos, gordos, y grandes.

We betta' werk hermanas,

because,

Grad school is hard.

The addict

"Glitter Shaman:

Reaching for perfection, he forgot he had gnawed off his arm. There was nothing there to extend, but a little blood and bone. Still he felt the need to catch the sun in the night. He burned himself over and over upon the fire, with legs to weak to notice what he had fell into--to weak to run, jump, gallop out of the flames that were to engulf his whole body. And, there was no sun to catch. His mind was lost. It was she, the transgender lady of the starts, that took him out of the fire, and retrieved his arm from his stomach. it was she, the mistress of water on earth that slapped him out of the hallucination induced by the horny white rabbit of mescal, playful love, and tender kisses. Unable to stay long, as her current pulled her back to the flow, she left him a shell, which he used to contemplate--meditate back into wholeness: reality. As the sun rose, his brothers began to bloom, and he rushed to be held once again in their garden. Still unable to fell his old-new arm, he reached for their embrace...

How do you think his peers responded?

Antonio:

They rejected him? Huh? because he didn't follow the rules, and he broke all of their trusts.

Glitter Shaman:

Not quite. Xochipilli was welcomed back, and was hugged so tightly, seed sprang forth to cover the earth. Still today, his friends and family, his brothers, embrace his body with radical tenderness: tattoos and vines."

---A story from the Glitter Shaman