This session will be closed captioned (transcribed).

Together with Founders of the Warsaw-based Kiki House of Sarmata, we will look into Ballroom culture and its intricacies when it comes to establishing and nurturing a vibrant community of Others.

Voguing and club culture are associated with extravagance, glitter and colourful appearance which encompasses in fact delicate, sensitive, almost naked human beings. Although they have different origins, body colours and shapes, orientations and identities, they share a passion for ballroom and the experience of exclusion in a heteronormative and transphobic society.

The Ballroom can be a tool for self-therapy, self-discovery, change and growing up. It is a place where new role-models are sought – a new mother and a new father. It allows for the recovery of autonomous space, in the geographical sense as a place in the urban fabric, but above all as a social and identity space. What Judith Butler called the performativity of gender is clearly visible in the ballroom. According to the researcher, gender is a socio-cultural construct. It is performed through repetitive gestures, patterns of behaviour, dress or social roles. Ballroom culture exposes its conventionality. It allows for the reinterpretation and questioning of the acquired patterns. In this sense, dance becomes a choreographic form of resistance against the existing socio-political order.

Thanks to Bożna and Danil you will learn about the history and development of ballroom locally and worldwide. Come in plenty and embrace your identities.

Don’t miss out on Mistresses of the Dark Kiki Ball by Father Danil Sarmata. Check the FB event.

This description is based on the curatorial text for the exhibition Room of Projected Horizons by Bożna Wydrowska, curated by Michalina Sablik and Kaja Werbanowska, which took place 3.06-20.08 at Galeria Promocyjna.