Long before the dances were immortalized in museums and NYC’s hallowed dance halls, they criss-crossed on the streets and, most significantly, the clubs. The locus points were multigenre venues: voguers were at Red Zone, The Underground/The Sound Factory, Latin Quarter and Escuelita; they bumped up with b-boys at The Loft and, later, The Tunnel. “Straight up, it all came up in the clubs and the streets,” says Jonathan Lee, who learned to dance from Robin Dunn, Crazy Legs and Mr. Wiggles, and now teaches hip hop dance at the Alvin Ailey Extension School. “Especially with voguing culture and the gay community, but people would dance in the club the way they wanted to dance. That’s where everyone could and can meet. People in the club are gonna dance regardless of their style. Even now, people who are lockers will lock to the music and voguers will vogue to the music – it just comes down to the DJ. At the club you can find everyone.”

The Loft during the 1980s was the most significant intersection of b-boying and voguing, in which breakers and banjee boys – gay men who dress socio-typically “masculine” – would combine elements of Old Way and popping and locking, creating a still-enduring style known as “lofting.” But in the late 1980s, as b-boying’s popularity waned and voguing’s phased in, the denizens passed each other on the way.

As voguing has been codified in museums and commercials, one important aspect to Newsome is how its past speaks to its future, and vice versa. “My interest in vogue is how it functions as a language that is constantly in a state of flux,” he says. “One cannot really go to a school and learn how to vogue. You go to where it’s happening, learn the language and make it your own. So in a lot of ways, whenever you encounter vogue, you’re encountering what’s in front of you and everything that came before it. [We should encourage] more experimentation of the language of vogue, so that it can live forever.”



