Alliance of International Production Houses

Despite all the obstacles and the changing seasons – Ballroom persists. Like an ancient forest with deeply grown roots, visible only to those who are part of the woods themselves – Ballroom persists. Determined, resilient, guarding, seeing to it that the wildest, most beautiful creatures can come up. At this evening, we call out to all of us to assemble: Show yourselves in all your colours! Let’s meet where the wild things grow.

Where Wild Things Grow perceives itself to be a classic voguing ball: Ballroom culture traces its roots to New York’s queer, Black, LatinX community. One of the characteristic traits at balls are the different categories in which the participants compete against each other. Because Black and LatinX LGBTQIA+ people had no access to Hollywood when Ballroom arose, nor to the glamourous fashion world or to privileged social milieus, they imitate and perform categories of said lifestyles. The ball categories carry high creative and performative demands and can be divided into five main groups: Fashion, Face, Body & Sex, Realness, and Performance.

Shapes&Shades is a collective consisting of five artists and cultural producers from NRW. Since 2020, it has curated events in the form of balls, workshops, parties, conceived performances and discursive formats. From 2021, these have taken place in cooperation with several cultural institutions such as tanzhaus nrw, Stadt:Kollektiv:Eden at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Düsseldorfer Weltkunstzimmer or Schauspiel Köln. The collective brought together icons and legends from the USA with pioneers and trailblazers from Europe and Asia and organized cultural, educational and artistic events in various formats.