On a recent weekend, competitors from Colombia, Korea, the Netherlands, Canada and more gathered for a chance to gain international acclaim. But I’m not talking about the Olympics. I’m talking about the House of Yes’ annual waacking competition.
Put together by Princess Lockeroo, given name Samara Cohen, and called “Waack to the Future,” these dance battles aim to celebrate “waacking,” a dance style that dates to 1970s LA, characterized by spiraling arm movements and an exaggerated theatricality, set to disco music. To “waack” is to dance this way and the “waackers” are the dancers themselves. Once popular among ballroom and dancers on the TV show “Soul Train,” it’s in the midst of a resurgence on Instagram and TikTok.
The annual Waack to the Future competition, previously known as “the Waackdown,” started in 2014 and always takes place during the last week of July. The theme this year was “disco-classical,” an idea that saw the combination of traditional disco music with classical fashion and this was evident from the moment you entered the doors. Dancers and spectators were clad in elbow length gloves, corsets and Marie Antoinette silhouettes. Everywhere you looked was lace, tulle, pearls, ruffles and bows.
Though the event officially started at 5:30pm, people seemed to continue to pour in and sign up to perform for some forty five minutes after; in line, dancers touched up their makeup and stretched. Some showed up in costume, others changed in the bathroom and emerged with a renewed confidence under the glow of disco balls. I could hear someone in an elegant pearl collared dress say they finally had a chance to wear it. In the foyer, dancers milled about, perusing a table populated with DON’T TALK TO ME WHILE I’M DANCING shirts and greeting one another with “ooh look at you!” and “so good to see you!” I could spot a bartender in avant garde clown makeup making a drink for a buzzcut in a delicate white dress.
Suddenly a man wearing a white powder wig and a pink rococo suit emerged from the main ballroom to commence the night’s dance battle. Some found their seats. Others improvised to the disco music playing. At the center stood Princess Lockeroon; her bedazzled gown demanded attention.
She introduced the judges: another professional dancer who goes by the name Waackeisha, the kiki scene regular Akuma Diva, a different waacker named Shahin and Dwayne Beach, currently employed as “concertmaster” for the “Jagged Little Pill Broadway Tour.” The emcee, in a pink suit, was a dance teacher named Cebo and the DJ was someone called Jaze-Art Remote. Cebo, Dwayne Beach and Princess Lockeroo started out out with a jovial skit about how Baroque outfits look “Buh-roke.” After some laughs, the battle began.
“Look down at your number and remember it,” said Lockeroo and, one by one, the 58 dancers were given 45 seconds to impress the judges in the first round; they waacked and they twirled and they posed in hope of being one of the lucky 32 to make it to the next round. As the night went on, the numbers narrowed down. At one point, judge Beach performed Vivaldi’s Storm with his string trio, while the other judges showed off their own waacking skills. Finally, after a showdown set to Walter Murphy’s A Fifth in Beethoven between a dancer in a baby blue lace gown and another in a navy petticoat, a winner was chosen: a dancer named Weezy took the crown and its $300 prize, to thunderous applause.
Lockeroo, a choreographer, dancer and “waacker” who once auditioned for season eight of So You Think You Can Dance in 2011 under her name Samara Cohen, says her life, nowadays, largely revolves around keeping waacking alive. The weekend of Waack to the Future, she flew back from a competition in Poland to attend a different waacking workshop in New York that Shahin and then judged another dance competition that very morning, before rushing back to host the battle of the House of Yes. Outside of these kinds of dancing appearances, she also runs the Waack Dancer Training Program.
Growing up in New York, she attended high school at LaGuardia and started her dance career in the musical theater. At 19, she fell into waacking upon the encouragement of her first dance teacher, Brian Green. At the time, waacking had lost its prominence and Green vowed to bring it back. He called upon one of the last pioneers of waacking, the “Soul Train” dancer Tyrone Proctor, and the pair started teaching the moves to a new generation of dancers, including Lockeroo.
In its heyday, waacking had taken the underground dance world by storm. Dance battle culture in the 1970s was typically masculine, and waacking had been created as a genderless subculture for queer people looking for an outlet to express themselves. It was originally called punking, an inside joke among the dancers that alluded to the use of “punk” in LA to refer to gay people, back then. Waacking prioritized storytelling, theatricality and a heightened sense of musicality. A group called “Breed of Motion,” featuring Proctor, evolved the style and would incorporate elements of voguing, a style that was taking off in the ballroom scene of New York City, as seen in the popular documentary “Paris is Burning.” While voguers on the East Coast drew inspiration from fashion models, the West Coast waackers were inspired by movie stars like Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich.
“Voguing was always a battle dance, a competitive dance,” Lockeroo told me, “When waacking was born, it was never born out of a competition. It was born out of the fact that the gay community did not really have a safe space for them to be themselves.”
During the final four of Waack to the Future, a song came on that Lockeroo said had been a favorite of Proctor’s, came on. It felt like an emotional moment; a few of the dancers had also been his former students, and they took a moment to cry before performing.
The reemergence of traditionally queer dance styles feels like it’s following a national trend. The number of queer-idenfiying adults in the U.S. at an all time high, with one in five Gen-Z adults identifying as LGBTQ+. In a 2010 documentary Martin Scorcese made with the writer Fran Lebowitz, Lebowitz somewhat famously said that “Everyone talks about the effect that AIDS had on the culture, they talked about what artists were lost but they never talked about this audience that was lost…An audience with a high level of connoisseurship is as important to the culture as the artists.”
Lockeroo says she is working to restore that education and that level of connoisseurship. While not queer herself, she has a long history of advocating for LGBTQ+ causes, particularly when it comes to talking up Proctor’s legacy. She describes the late “Soul Train” dancer, who died in 2020, as a personal mentor. Currently, she is working on putting together a documentary on waacking with a director named Aaron Matthews which she says aims to capture the waacking renaissance.
“It’s this connection to these dancers who we never met, you know, the creators, the founders, the originators, who all passed away of AIDS in the 80s and 90s,” said Lockeroo. “This is more than just a dance competition. This is a gift that they have given the world and they never got to see their legacy, but we are carrying this legacy.”
Photos taken by Molly B. Healy.
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