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. “It’s about finding the right event-and the ball is that event.”įlash 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. “I think it’s really exciting, because it shows there is this need for connectivity with everyone,” he adds. Ballroom becomes the sport of the queer community. 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. “It’s factioned, and it’s unusual to see them all in one place. “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. 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.Įscamillan says what he loves most about ballroom is that it brings marginalized people from all segments of the queer community together. Eventually he was ready to bring a big event to Vancouver in 2017, when Van Vogue Jam and BRoll held the Dynasty Ball. 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.Įscamillan made many trips back there in the ensuing years, teaching his own by-donation classes here. 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. It gives a really amazing platform for the new generation of queer people coming up.”Įscamillan, a well-known dancer on the contemporary scene and founder of Van Vogue Jam, had a ballroom mother of his own. Whereas in ballroom, we can show what queerness can be outside of this oversexualized stereotype that we see in the media. And both of those places don’t always foster a healthy relationship with oneself. “When I was young, the only way to see it was through online or if you were able to get into a club. “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. He takes his duties as a mentor, teacher, and role model to Gvasalia’s diverse young “children” as seriously as any matriarch would. And in Vancouver, Escamillan now heads up the Kiki House of Gvasalia.
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. 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.