The show is called ‘Pose,’ but it strikes much more
NEW YORK — On a recent afternoon, a few floors above the ballroom set where the FX series “Pose” is filming, a rehearsal studio pounds with the 1990 dance-club hit “Strike It Up.” Leiomy Maldonado, a ballroom icon known as the Wonder Woman of Vogue, is trying to get her dancers to feel the beat with their hips.
“Pump, pump, girl,” Maldonado commands one young woman in blue stiletto booties and a sheer top dripping in fringe. “You’re doing it without even caring!”
Snapping her haunches side to side and crisscrossing her thighs with every step, Maldonado demonstrates a full-out, queen-of-thecatwalk strut, Naomi Campbell style. She drops her voice and purrs, with a note of reverence: “You on the runway, dahling.”
Perfecting the moves and the sassitude is crucial in this show. “Pose,” which begins its second season June 11, is part family drama, part musical extravaganza, as you’d expect from creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, of “Glee” and “American Horror Story.” (Writer Steven Canals joins them as a co-creator.) Premiering during Pride Month, as it did last year, the series centers on the trans women and gay men of color in New York’s underground ballroom culture.
The first season, inspired by the 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning,” was set in the late 1980s as the characters forged their chosen families — “houses” — and tried to put the hardships of nonconforming life behind them by competing in voguing and runway contests under a glittering disco ball.
Season 2 jumps to the early ’90s, as the HIV/AIDS crisis builds and Madonna’s “Vogue” video brings the trans-ball culture and voguing into the mainstream.
But what Madonna couldn’t possibly convey was why the proud bearing and grand movements of vogue mattered to the women and men who invented ball culture. The ballroom scene arose from emptiness, dreamed into existence by young people, mostly black and Latino, who had been shunned by their biological families and faced homelessness, violence, sex work and disease. They filled the void with fantasies of wealth and magazinecover beauty and strolling Fifth Avenue like they owned it. Their aspirations took shape at the balls.
More important, indulging in the exaggerated femininity of the spins, dips and floor poses of voguing and practicing a killer runway walk in 6-inch heels were keys to survival. As the crowd jeers and cheers, competitors vie for trophies in different categories, each one with specific requirements in costuming and mannerisms, such as “executive,” “town and country” and “royalty.” Confidence and stately self-presentation might bring a trans woman or gay man closer to the golden ideal of fitting into cisgendered society.
“That’s why we have categories like ‘realness,’ ” says Dominique Jackson, a model and ballroom champion from Trinidad and Tobago who plays “Pose’s” haughty quasi-villain Elektra Abundance. Jackson is eating a salad in her dressing room, carefully, still in heavy ’90s makeup and costume: a purple sequined skirt suit and a black-and-gold fascinator with dangling beads pinned to the side of her updo. Her posture is so elegantly upright that the beads barely jiggle as she speaks. Her one concession to downtime: Uggs boots. (All the cast members received them, a relief from hours spent shooting in sky-high pumps.)
“In the realness categories, what happens is you walk and your peers judge you because if you’re not able to walk amongst your peers and pass as being cis male or cis female, then it’s obvious that you haven’t done enough work,” Jackson says. “They wanted you to be able to go outside and come back home safely.”
“Pose” made TV history with its cast of trans actors in recurring roles, including Jackson, MJ Rodriguez as nurturing house mother Blanca, and Indya Moore as Angel, a sensitive hooker who’s one of Blanca’s adopted daughters. Trans artists collaborate behind the scenes, including choreographer Maldonado and writer-director and activist Janet Mock, who’s also a producer.
Even as LGBT themes have come to the fore in TV (in such shows as “Orange Is the New Black,” “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” “Transparent”), this team is different. The cast also includes gay actors of color, such as Tony winner and activist Billy Porter (”Kinky Boots”) as ballroom emcee Pray Tell, who’s prone to ditching his script and ad-libbing quips to make a stripper blush.
“Everyone in the cast feels the freedom of this show,” Porter says, referring to the layered, complex representation of a community that’s largely unknown in pop culture, and that now has the chance to tell its own story. For many who work on the show, the characters’ journeys parallel their own.
“Ballroom saved my life,” says Twiggy Pucci Garcon, one of the choreographers. “I’d been asked to leave my church, I wasn’t getting along with my family. It was a rough time, and at the same time I discovered ballroom, and it was just what I needed. … When you step onto the ballroom floor, you’re saying, ‘I matter.’ “