How we organize history informs how we organize ourselves and our futures. In the long-term collaborative investigations and discussions, historical research, installations and collective listening sessions conducted as part of the Vogue’ology project the artists and curators of this exhibition consider how members of New York City’s House|Ballroom scene might organize their own histories. Vogue’ology is a collaboration between the Ballroom Archive & Oral History Project and Ultra-red’s School of Echoes. The investigation begins with the question: “What is the sound of Ballroom?”

Since 1994, Ultra-red have been developing sound-based methodologies for collective reflection and analysis of lived experience. These sound investigations employ instructions, or protocols for collective listening that guide participants through listening together to audio recordings of everyday life places, events and speech. This experience of listening together serves as a catalyst for sharing, discussing and analyzing what people hear in the recordings themselves and in the ways others listen.

The protocols collected in this document facilitated the recording and listening procedures used in the prior three phases of the Vogue’ology project: 1. The New School Encuentro, a gathering of members of The New School’s Gender Studies Program and members of the House|Ballroom scene; 2. Ballroom Archive Project oral history interviews conducted by and with members of the House|Ballroom scene; and 3. Vogue’analysis, a series of Vogue performances reviewed and discussed by some of the form’s key practitioners.

Vogue’ology, the final protocol, guides this phase of the investigation on exhibition at Parsons The New School. We invite you to follow the steps in this protocol, which ask you to listen through an encounter between archival objects and audio statements derived from recordings of the project’s prior phases. As you proceed through the instructions you will develop your own written record of how your experience and understanding of objects and statements shift in relation to each other. In the final step we invite you to consider what this record of your own process might contribute to a deeper understanding of how to organize collective histories.

About the Ballroom Archive and Oral History Project

The House|Ballroom scene emerged in New York City in the first half of the last century and is today found in cities across the United States. Members of the scene have organized themselves into houses, such as the House of Ebony, the House of Evisu, and the House of Garçon, which function as intentional communities and artistic collectives. Houses sponsor Balls; large events at which members compete in multiple performance categories. For generations of transgender, bi, lesbian and gay people of color, the Balls have provoked radical explorations of style, identity and social inequality. As such, the Balls have inspired propositions about what might be possible if fundamental social structures were radically changed.

The scene’s signature performance style is the complexly mimetic dance-performance form, Vogue, which developed from the careful study of the exaggerated femininity evident in fashion images. Styles and categories of vogueing are constantly being influenced and restructured by individual creativity, new trends in popular culture and fashion, as well as shifts in the terms of gender, race, ethnicity and class. As a celebration and analysis of desires, vogue signals a key political dimension to the House|Ballroom community activities.

The House|Ballroom scene also constitutes a large, multi-generational community of care and support. Through deep bonds of friendship, the scene provides a rich experience of community to its members in the midst of life-changing negotiations around sexual and gender identity. Furthermore, the scene becomes a crucial site of solidarity for those experiencing the consequences of, and organizing collective resistance to homophobic violence, transphobia, racism and the social injustices of homelessness and poverty. As a creative community, the scene has and continues to contribute an enormous amount of its cultural labor to the spheres of music, fashion, design, and performance often with little or no acknowledgment.

The Ballroom Archive and Oral History Project was initiated in Spring 2010 by Arbert Santana Evisu, a prominent member of the House|Ballroom Scene. The decision to archive House|Ballroom histories builds on the scene’s established tradition of intergenerational learning and a fierce insistence on survival in the face of an AIDS crisis that has disproportionately burdened this community. The archive has already benefited from contributions by many member of the House|Ballroom scene who have donated materials and expertise and who have participated in oral history interviews.

Vogue’ology is curated by Arbert Santana Evisu, Carin Kuoni and Ultra-red with special guidance from Edgar Rivera-Colon, Jennifer Evisu, and J’Lin Evisu. For Vogue’ology, Ultra-red organize themselves as Robert Sember and Dont Rhine.

Vogue’ology began as part of Robert Sember’s 2009-2010 fellowship with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.