Posh Ball builds an energized and empowering new tradition at Pride Vancouver
Van Vogue Jam founder Ralph Escamillan takes international runway competition online
Leiomy Maldonado at the 2069: Ball of the Future. Photo by John Bello Photography.
Photo by John Bello Photography
Van Vogue Jam and Vancouver Pride Society present the Posh Ball: Online Kiki Ball on July 31 at 6 pm.
OF THE MANY roles Vancouver dance artist Ralph Escamillan is taking on to bring Pride’s spectacular online Posh Ball to life—including director, organizer, and host—perhaps his most important is as a mother.
That’s because—right back to its roots in the young, queer Black and Latinx subculture in New York City—ballroom and voguing are traditionally built around “houses” run by a parent or parents. And in Vancouver, Escamillan now heads up the Kiki House of Gvasalia.
He takes his duties as a mentor, teacher, and role model to Gvasalia’s diverse young “children” as seriously as any matriarch would.
“If I was a queer young person exposed to queer culture in this capacity, I think it would have really changed the way I perceived myself,” he reflects in an interview with Stir. “When I was young, the only way to see it [ballroom culture] was through online or if you were able to get into a club. And both of those places don’t always foster a healthy relationship with oneself. Whereas in ballroom, we can show what queerness can be outside of this oversexualized stereotype that we see in the media. It gives a really amazing platform for the new generation of queer people coming up.”
Escamillan, a well-known dancer on the contemporary scene and founder of Van Vogue Jam, had a ballroom mother of his own. Discovering streetdance forms like disco-driven waacking and runway-inspired voguing in his mid-teens, he later found full-on ballroom culture during a stint in Toronto. That led him to New York City in 2013, to train with the legendary Leiomy Maldonado—a transgender Afro-Puerto Rican dance artist known as the Wonder Woman of Vogue—and to become part of her House of Amazon.
Ralph Escamillan
Escamillan made many trips back there in the ensuing years, teaching his own by-donation classes here. Eventually he was ready to bring a big event to Vancouver in 2017, when Van Vogue Jam and BRoll held the Dynasty Ball. After that, he sought the consent from his mother Leiomy to build his own house—and to start cultivating a scene, a “family”, and a community here.
Escamillan says what he loves most about ballroom is that it brings marginalized people from all segments of the queer community together.
“When communities are built, they’ll often break themselves into categories that they’ve been put into by society,” he says, referring to gay men, lesbian, and other groups. “It’s factioned, and it’s unusual to see them all in one place. But I feel like the balls, when we’ve done them, have been the first times where I’ve seen people that would usually never connect or never see each other together. Ballroom becomes the sport of the queer community.
“I think it’s really exciting, because it shows there is this need for connectivity with everyone,” he adds. “It’s about finding the right event—and the ball is that event.”
Flash forward to 2021 and Escamillan, who hosted an online ball at Vancouver Pride 2020, is ready to throw a truly international virtual ballroom competition on July 31 as part of Vancouver Pride. Having “walked” (the term for competing on the ball runway) across Canada and the US, and judged events as far away as Thailand and the Philippines, Escamillan has the global connections to throw a world-class event. (This will be the seventh ball that he’s helped bring to the city.)
The Posh event is a Kiki ball—Kiki tracing back to the Latinx and Black kids in New York who weren’t able to compete in mainstream ballroom competitions there, and so created their own scene.
A Van Vogue Jam class. Photo by Yvonne Chew
Runway competitors have a chance to win cash prizes and gift cards, with music by DJ Black Catt and a slew of international judges from the ballroom scene.
Ever the multitasker, Escamillan will be the one working the controls (with technical support from multimedia artist Chimerik), live-editing the production.
“All competitors will be coming in from Zoom,” he explains. “On the day, everyone stays in the Zoom meeting room. And when we call them in to do their walk, what you see is two people competing on two screens and judges all along the bottom.”
Escamillan, who appears as Mother Posh Gvasalia, invites everyone to attend and get swept up in the energy and suspense of the competition, to bask in the mad runway skills, and to learn its highly codified rules (note the dip always comes on the fourth beat). Ballroom, as this pioneer has built it here, is an inclusive event.
“Across the board, all over the world now, there are a lot of white folks who feel that they shouldn't be in the room or don't feel they belong,” he says. To them, Escamillan extends an invitation: “Do your research, watch Paris Is Burning,” he advises. “The past year has really divided us. I want to see division turn into an opportunity to connect.”
And prepare yourself for a return of the Posh Ball as a much-anticipated annual Pride tradition—hopefully, where you can watch competitors go dip-for-dip live and in dazzling person. Its visual theme will always be a Faberge egg (check out the poster below), as Escamillan explains it, because the ball will be a glistening new creation every time it happens.
“I feel like the event is so unique to this city that it will be ongoing, as long as I can push it, because of its impact in the community,” Escamillan says.
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