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Critic’s notebook

Two Vogue Shows Strike Art-World Poses

Rashaad Newsome and Kia LaBeija provide fierceness and flash but their shows come up short as dance.

Alex Mugler in Rashaad Newsome’s “Five” at New York Live Arts.Credit...Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

If vogueing is taken out of its original context, what is the cost?

That’s the concern that has been raised whenever vogueing, which developed decades ago as a competition form in underground balls, mainly for black and Latino gay men, gets some mainstream attention — as it has again recently, with the success of “Pose” on FX.

Usually, the discussion is about appropriation and misrepresentation. But those weren’t the issues raised by two performances in New York this weekend — Rashaad Newsome’s “Five” and Kia LaBeija’s “Untitled: The Black Act.” The vogue-ballroom credentials of both productions were strong, which left the seemingly less fraught question: If you take vogue dancers out of the ballroom and put them in a theater, what does the new context demand?

In the case of “Five,” at New York Live Arts, the context was actually at a double remove, since the work has previously been presented mainly in art galleries and museums. What might serve, in those settings, as a challenge to definitions of drawing and sculpture, seemed in the theater like something less than a substantial dance show.

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Dancers in Mr. Newsome’s “Five” had color-coded leggings, gloves, wigs and even contact lenses.Credit...Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

It lasted barely 30 minutes, though there was a lot going on. In addition to eight dancers, many of them flaunting the earned honorific “legendary,” there was a five-person band, a small gospel choir and more vocalists, including two ballroom M.C.’s spitting out profane, purring encouragement with thrillingly violent force. Mr. Newsome — a multidisciplinary artist but not a choreographer — stood center stage, facing away from the audience like a conductor and manning a table’s worth of computers, converting the dancers’ motions into video graphics projected on the back wall.

The format was partly pedagogical. After three dancers fiercely demonstrated techniques of hair flinging and high kicks, the other five, in sequential solos, fiercely isolated the five standard elements of Vogue Fem style: hands, catwalking, spins and dips, floorwork (rolls, splayed legs) and duckwalking (on the toes, in a deep squat). Each of these five was color-coded: leggings, gloves, wigs and even contact lenses all in the same single shade.

But after this introduction came little development — some unison, then another rotation of solos with new music (by Mr. Newsome), requiem-like this time, the dancers goaded by the stratospheric melisma of the vocalist Kyron El. Individual dancers made an impression (especially the imperiously truculent Leggoh LaBeija), but there was more flash-and-fade than inventive variation, and all the artists were subsumed in the sensory-overload collage, the color scheme, the concept.

A dance-party coda, with Mr. Newsome and the vocalists and members of the audience all showing their moves, was unsurprisingly winning. Yet Mr. Newsome’s vision of vogueing, evident in his video-graphic squiggles and his dance-derived artwork in the lobby, is of a tangle of lines. That’s reflected in “Five” to the detriment of dance as dance.

“Untitled: The Black Act,” at Performance Space New York, also had one foot in ballroom culture and one in the art world. Kia LaBeija is a pedigreed, champion voguer — formerly mother, or leader, of the august vogue family Royal House of LaBeija — but she is also a photographer whose work has been shown in galleries and museums. And her inspiration for “Untitled,” presented as part of the performance-art biennial Performa 19, was a famous piece of art history: “Das Triadische Ballett,” a 1922 performance created by the Bauhaus designer Oskar Schlemmer. (This year’s Performa has a Bauhaus theme.)

Schlemmer’s work was essentially an avant-garde fashion show — masked performers in elaborate costumes composed of cones, spirals and other silhouette-altering shapes, moving like puppets or figurines. It’s easy to see how a vogue artist would be attracted by the fashion fantasy of it, but also perhaps repelled by the impersonal aesthetic. Ms. LaBeija’s take was at once faithful and divergent.

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Kia LaBeija in “Untitled: The Black Act,” inspired by the Bauhaus designer Oskar Schlemmer.Credit...Paula Court

On the front of the stage floor, laid out in tape, was a spiral of straight lines and right angles; further back was a grid. Both designs derive from the third part, the so-called black part, of Schlemmer’s work, as did most of Kyle Luu’s glamorous costumes, distinguished from the original designs mainly by more sparkle and less boldness.

Like Mr. Newsome, Ms. LaBeija (in the program note) pays lip service to the virtues of improvisation, but high-level improvisation is as rigorous a discipline as choreography, and much of “Untitled,” mixing bits of vogue with shallow borrowings from ballet and other forms, lacked sustaining power. Each section had an idea — one performer walking out of the spiral maze, two facing off as a mirrored pair — that was like a shell with too little inside it.

One partial exception was a late solo for Ms. LaBeija, accompanied by her father, Warren Benbow, on drums. Mr. Benbow, a veteran musician, understands improvisation, and as he worked up a brilliant abstraction of stripper music, Ms. LaBeija’s charisma emerged most fully. She reminded me of a young Josephine Baker.

It was significant, too, that at this point Ms. LaBeija had shed her elaborate costume for a simple corset-like affair, and had pushed the other elaborately costumed dancers offstage. Already, she had been pulling up strips of tape, and as the others returned in rehearsal attire, they helped her finish the cleanup job.

“Untitled” became a communal ritual. Ms. LaBeija elegantly unrolled a strip of tape toward the exit, a path that she and then her dancers followed. From a spiral labyrinth and an urban grid, she had created not a tangle but an illuminated line: an escape route, perhaps, on a journey that was personal but did not exclude others. This shape was moving, even if “Untitled” didn’t do justice to vogueing as dance.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Vogue Dancers Sashay Beyond the Ballroom. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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