Amy Watson and Dennis Keighron-Foster's Deep in Vogue (2018) is showing June 18 – July 17, 2019 in the United Kingdom.
Over the last few years we’ve seen a general slide to the right in politics—this is never a good thing for the LGBTQ+ and POC communities. Historically, Vogue is a reaction to political and social oppression, it’s an externalized explosion of expression, a revolution of color and beauty, an underground uprising of power and an exploration of who you truly are… and a massive middle finger to anyone who dares to contain or side-line you.
When I first stumbled across the Manchester Vogue scene my jaw dropped at its mere existence—as a queer, effeminate man I’d never found a place that celebrated who I was in the regular gay scene; and to be in that room full of other disenfranchised minorities, strutting their stuff, cheering each other and looking insanely fabulous, quite honestly changed my life. There is nothing more empowering than showing who you really are or revealing your innermost creative fantasies to a room full of people also yearning to be accepted, celebrated, or simply just wanting to find an outlet and be around people that make them feel safe. Sometimes this isn’t on a conscious level, but no one can deny the flame that is ignited at your first vogue ball.
When Amy and I first started making this documentary it was simply because we wanted to give something back to this community that made us fizz with joy, but it quickly became so much more and oh so quickly. We learned why this queer, black, and Latino dance of 1980s Harlem, NYC was needed so badly and in the North West of England of all places, and how although it enjoys its roots and teachings from those original American house structures, it’s a much more open and celebratory version. The Northern Vogue scene doesn’t emulate the past, but remembers it, celebrates it and shares it in order to replace those truly queer places lost to commercialization and to provide a family for those cast out of theirs.
Deep in Vogue is set to a back drop of austerity and a politically severed country—but while “all this Trump crap happens outside the door,” as Rikki Beadle-Blair says, a writhing resistance is happening in the clubs of Manchester and Liverpool, and its dancers, house mothers, drag artists, and pillars of the queer community are pulling us all to the dance floor.