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