Ballroom Culture: the Language of Vogue | Ronald Murray | TEDxColumbus

this is angel it's 1983 angels been a little different about himself lately he's certain has certain feelings for certain people he should have feelings for so Android does what we always instruct our students to do angel goes to school and talks to his teacher and guidance counselor I said you know what these feelings aren't really off the ordinary talk to your parents they should know about this makes you support you in this so angel gets the courage and says today today I'm gonna do it so Ranger comes home which was mom and daddy get home from work and he gets turned says mom and dad I need to talk to you about something and it sounded real serious because his voice got real deep so his dad put the table down and said What's Wrong son and he says dad mom I think I'm gay his mom's meetly starts crying then his dad ruffles to paper again and moves the paper off his lap and says son what do you mean he said well I know I'm gay dad I'm gay and so it's dad says I'm gonna ask you one more time son and after I ask you you gonna have two options one you're gonna tell me if you are gay and if you say you are the second option is you're gonna pack a book bag and leave my house now so Angie looks this father says father I am gay his dad said would get everything that I bet you bought and put in your book bag and leave so angels thirteen years old so he can get a job he has had no money so until he really put his book there with a toothbrush and angel left so only place angel knew the goal was where he heard a lot of young gay black Latino youth were going in New York at the time which was called the famous pier so angel found enough money in his pockets and took a train to the pier an angel is that the pier now so angel lays on the benches and he's learned from some of the other kid two runaways and a homeless kids there how to survive he's learned to sleep on the bench and only put everything on him that he needs and makes sure that when someone touches the bench that he jumps up he's going to defend himself he's going bid here five days and he's really street smart now do one thing to Angel did see was that in this pier there's a lot of young people following different people around they were grouped together and he was trying to figure out how they felt its connectivity amongst each other how can I be like that one day angel had found some money he was paying hailey and got some money with eating a hamburger this woman went past him she said child what you doing out here and angels now been out there two weeks so now he really knows how to be street-smart said what's the what's it to you cuz the defense mechanism tells you that when they asked you something they want something and she said oh you were a sassy one he said well yeah yeah what's that was good she said well why you out here he said why you think I'm out here so this one back and forth she was amused by his ability to keep on his feet and then there's some other young people ran up behind her and start calling her mother and say mom are you ready to go and she he looked at her he said he's your kid she said yes these are my kids this is my house he said well what's a house and she said well follow me and I'll show you that was his introduction into the house in ballroom world so what is house and ballroom house and ballroom is existed under our noses from about 35 to 40 years we can trace the rates we can trace it back to the Harlem Renaissance of 1920s it was a culture that evolved out of the dry Harlem drag scene about 1970 the house and Barbarin became a voice for individuals who were disenfranchised rejected and dejected from the family homes these individuals found one another and became marginalized together I'm sorry they found one another and connected together to come a unified voice for many people in the house and ballroom scene the houses became who they were so physically what happened like an angel story somebody became a mother figure a leader and this person became the father of the mother and collected children around them or her and pretended a safe space for them a safe space that their biological parents should have provided for them and she they taught them different things and when they formed these spaces they say let not we need to have a name a family name and so some of these houses are forming names like Pandavas or labeija Evanier Levin and these names became something they were proud of much like my last name was Marie they're very proud of their last names and then from the names that came proud of then they start figuring out how to express ourselves an expression of the house culture became the ballroom which was between the houses would compete against one another trying to find out who was the best one at that time again this culture is existed under our noses for 40 years so if house is the physical unity of the family formed then ballroom would be the competition in the culture well watch this what a video [Applause] take a big look at it yes it's me and that's a little too laughing got tried it but no that's me twenty what I heard I said extra giggle don't do that he's still cute twenty years ago or so I got to my age twenty-something years ago and this was me about nineteen twenty didn't know who I was my story's not Angel story I'm someone asked me earlier was that like asking for a friend no my story wasn't like Angels my story's a little unique in that I had a family who loved me and accepted me I didn't know how I could love myself being raised in a church and being an inn closeted gay man a young gay man I didn't know that the gayness that I had that my family would accept it they did but at this time here I didn't know I live in a homeless shelter I thought about killing myself several times I had no direction is somewhere around nineteen something not gonna tell you 99 to something I found house in ballroom House involvement kind of created the man you see before you now twenty something years later I'm a social worker or we're gonna major company have my own consulting company and I teach other young people how to find their own voices in and outside the ballroom scene so if I had to come up with one word to summarize bar one for my life I can say about him saved my life it created a courageous advocate it created a confident man that you see before you I went from this and I think at this time I was living at homeless shelter so someone is on front of the stage with you a TED talk so let's talk about why this matters like I said before ballroom has been influential in our pop culture for the last poly 3040 years we've been under cusp and just behind every moment that's happened for my pop stars to the way we dress to the way we've danced in a way we talk we've been in every infiltrated part there but we've been there just enough that we were not noticed our invisibility became a factor for us when I first taught in Barbara and Barbara was it something that you bragged and talked about it wasn't surprised the last 15 years to people appreciate who we were and that we find out in recent years that people who are a part of the house in ballroom seem has to be crazy become the influences of pop culture we are the cups of what we do when we say certain phrases certain phrases of falling we're here on television when we dress certain ways people talk to us about it what matters for this here is that we've sometimes overlooked this population and when populations were overlooked they developed they're almost systems and so now as we're developing on the system these systems are kind of colliding it's time for our voices to be heard all right so now here's the thing that I know you all know about is Vogon right but did she did know it came from us know what you thought Madonna did it 1993 and that's where it popped out it no Vogon became our art form that we were allowed to exist in mainstream and it became the way we express ourselves in our talents and it became the way we created our dance moves so voguing came from house and borrowed for him in 1971 but we just never got credit for the projects of 2018 so one thing about voguing that expresses our culture and allows us to exist is that once we know that language it allows a culture to exist there was a language of voguing the movements tell a story whether it was your struggle and invisibility and also the movies tell where you came from or what region you were in so the first one we're going to talk about is hands hands tells a pantomime stories so instead of for in business seventies individuals would start kind of like breakdancing or pop locking but the hands kind of tells the story if we were talking about a book and we're gonna have sky show your hands I mean mage I'm sorry now hands tells the story the catwalk turns to pages the catwalk is a fast way that you go for one position to the other while you move yourself or one position research the other it's the way you fill your hips it's the way you fill your sass we will have sky show us a catwalk [Music] now the third element is the duck walk and for me to death work it's the hardest one because the duck walk requires a lot of leg muscle the dead walk allows you to move up and down through a battle or through a garret the boundary of life so we're gonna have made um Lamont show us a duck walk [Music] [Music] so the last two of the five elements is the floors and the spins and the dips so if the hands told the story and the catwalk turned to page and then Doug walk took us from one phrase to the next phrase the fourth performance either ends the sentence for us and then the spin to the hips or the period so we're going to show you four performers and it spins and dips [Music] so now when we put all the elements together you now have a full conversation and this conversation through Vogue and our art from the dance has allowed us to express ourselves whether you knew it came from us or not it talked about our struggle and it talks about our invisibility so I'm gonna have you have a conversation with the dancers as you watch them express themselves [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 158,593

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Art, Community, Creativity, Culture, Dance (performance), Family, History, HIV, Identity, LGBT, Race

Id: QS5j7PCSdtg

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 04 2019