Vogue and voguing: Madonna and Her Ballroom Dancers

yw47

Thursday 15 November 2018

In March 1990, Vogue was released as the first single in the second soundtrack album of Madonna, I’m Breathless. As the name indicates, it is a song inspired by “voguing”, a particular form of dancing developed in the contemporary ballroom culture of African-American LGBTQ community that features intricate movements in the hands of the dancer. Several well-known vogue dancers as well as Black LGBTQ community members, including Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza and Luis Xtravaganza, were invited to take part in the filming of the music video of the song as well as the live tours that followed. Besides turning out to be a hit, the song inspired lots of people from the LGBTQ community and was the first time when voguing and its culture are introduced to the vast majority of the public. After decades, even in 2018, Vogue remains one of the most iconic and most frequently cited songs that represent the community.

As Madonna’s second single, Vogue is undoubtedly commercial. What is achieved, however, is far more than a piece of popular commodity. The song, first of all, offers the mainstream culture a chance to encounter voguing and, more importantly, ballroom dancing culture and the community where it was originated. Voguing, as an art form, spread across the world, raising public awareness on the existence of the community and related issues such as racial and sexual-orientation-based discriminations and AIDS.As the term suggests, the origin of vogue is closely related to the fashion magazine Vogue, the cover pages of which usually feature classy models and celebrities, often women in overtly soft and feminine poses.[1] It implies, on one hand, the longing for the life of the white upper class of the ballroom communities and, on the other hand, the hope of deconstructing and redefining the mainstream cultural canon, as the majority of the community members are biologically male and are expected to represent masculinity. The ballroom members took pieces from the heterosexual female beauty standards, exaggerated it and created new forms of aesthetics that the community members could identify with.

Apart from the birth of vogue, combination of subculture and mainstream culture is evident in the design of the music video as well. Instead of showing voguers contesting in a typical ballroom setting, David Fincher, the director of the video, chose to break voguing into fragmented movements and synthesize them with styles and aesthetics that are more readily accepted by the mainstream audiences. For example, at the beginning of the video, the dancers are dressed in deluxe suits and posed alongside works of high art like oil paintings, classical sculptures, and an Ionic column. Shoot in black-and-white, the video also references avant-garde art movements, including the geometrical layout of the Bauhaus, the low key lighting of German Expressionism, and the dream-like atmosphere of Surrealism. These detail treatments of the video blur the distinctions between the aesthetics of voguing and the concept of “vogue” that shared by the majority of the public, making the former easier to digest and eliminating its sense of otherness. At the same time, the video does not let off any opportunities to attack the then largely existing gender and racial stereotypes and the discriminations they brought along. It is first of all directly addressed in the lyrics when Madonna sings “It makes no difference if you’re black or white, if you’re a boy or a girl.” The black-and-white camera reduces the visibilities of the differences in the facial features and the skin colours of the white and the non-white dancers, and both female dancers, including Madonna herself, and male dancers are dressed in similar costumes. All the voguers, regardless of race and gender, are captured making stereotypical feminine gestures wearing suits that are generally considered masculine. The video creates a genderless and race-less space that allows all the people, including those from the ballroom community, to represent themselves as who they are.

On another level, this video embodies the interweaving of popular culture and politics. In her interview with Leshu Torchin, Judith Helfand encouraged the idea of incorporating politically involved films into film festivals, as it creates a “neutral space”[2] that simultaneously offers cultural and artistic engagements as well as a sense of recognition of the community. Similarly, by introducing voguing into the song of Madonna, Vogue not only provides the audiences with a chance to appreciate the dance as a pure art form but also ensures the community members that they are important and that they could be contributors of the mainstream culture as well. Meanwhile, the aura of Madonna guarantees a considerable amount of media coverage even without extra effort in marketing. The video naturally receives the attention of all mainstream media, so that documentaries like Truth or Dare (1991) and Strike a Pose (2016) could be made. More importantly, the act of including actual non-white LGBTQ dancers and allowing them to take an active part in the choreography physically engaged the community into the project. As one of the voguers recalled in Strike a Pose, on the lives that follow the release of Vogue, there are not only fans of Madonna but also supporters from the community and admirers of the voguers in the audience. On top of that, Madonna herself overtly addressed the topic of sexual health during the performances, turning the stage into a space of public education. Besides professional training that they received through the process, the selected members also became deeply attached to each other both culturally and emotionally, and another micro-community is generated among the voguers and Madonna. Solidarity is formed within the dancers and the larger community.

Despite the fact that the music video and the related campaigns seem to be a success both commercially and politically, the project also encounters problems and difficulties. As the mother of Gabriel, a dancer who had passed away due to AIDS, stated, the decision of coming out was not his idea, but Madonna’s. She was largely the decision maker in the documentary, and the dancers had no power to refuse. Exploitation on the comparatively underprivileged dancers and their images are difficult to avoid. Furthermore, as Constantine Chatzipapatheodoridis mentioned[3] it is risky to align subculture with mainstream culture in a public space, as the latter could easily commodify and consequentially plunder the former. However, there is no denying that Vogue and its music video successfully raised awareness on the ballroom community and related social issues and simultaneously engaged the community members into the physical process of making the project.

[1] Constantine Chatzipapatheodoridis, “Strike a Pose, Forever: The Legacy of Vogue and its RE-contextualization in Contemporary Camp Performances” in European Jornal of American Studies 11, no. 3 (2017): 1.

[2] Leshu Torchin, “How to Leverage A Film Festival: An Interview with Judith Helfand, Filmmaker and Co-funder of Chicken & Egg Picture and Working Films” in Film Festival Yearbook 4 (St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012), 261.

[3] Chatzipapatheodoridis, 2.