Nupita Obama Creates Vogua
Saya Naomi in Nupita Obama Creates Vogua.
Nupita Obama Creates Vogua (2015)
Created and directed by: Aymar Jean Christian
Written by: Aymar Jean Christian, with Erik Lamar Wallace, Kiam Junio and Saya Naomi
Produced by: Myra Boone
Nupita Obama Creates Vogua is a pilot for a series, Nupita Obama, focusing on gender nonconforming artists of color who use performance to smooth social, economic and sexual situations. It’s a play on polyamorous living and the ways queer people of color navigate conflict to create new models for family.
In Nupita, performance becomes technology for cultivating queer relationships. I devised the idea of vogua, combining voguing and yoga, inspired both by my own physical fitness practices for surviving Chicago ’s winters and by the artists in my community who practiced these forms, including Kiam Marcelo Junio, a performance artist and yogi; Erik Lamar Wallace, a hip-hop artist and vogue dancer; and Saya Naomi, a drag queen. I wrote the pilot with the clear direction that they would contribute their art and writing. Collectively, the three of them created an image of vogua. We met for two rehearsals in which they workshopped vogua together and read through the script, adjusting lines to feel natural as they went.
Nupita was an experiment in expanding who gets to be seen as a TV writer. Each change to the script reflected Kiam, Wallace and Saya’s intimate relationship to their identities, communities and crafts. Kiam added “making love, marking art” to the first lines for Erik ’s character, to suggest collaboration and polyamory more strongly; they also both changed the yoga chant I ’d written to one that more specifically reflected the theme of peace and adjusted the lines they say in the yoga class scene to reflect what they actually say as yoga instructors. Erik changed a line where the character proposes vogua as yoga set to “Black queer music” (my language) to “cunt beats,” the term used in ball culture to describe performances of “ultimate femininity” (Bailey, 2011), and a line referring to Gia “dancing” to “Gia can shake her ass,” closer to quare vernacular. As former member of a house, Erik changed my line, “I ’m not going to try to one-up Willie Ninja” (a famous voguer who choreographed for Madonna), to “You can ’t just adopt a legendary house name. You have to be inducted,” a way to make the line more specific and informative. After the line, “How about Knowles?,” when the three troubleshoot Nupita ’s house name that would become “Obama,” Erik added, “That [Knowles] is a legendary house name,” which is something house members might say in joking about Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.
Queer POC artists often learn multiple crafts as a survival strategy, and this work brings tremendous “production value,” extending my limited resources. In Vogua they did their own choreography and costumes. Most of the set comes from the art and materials of Kiam Marcelo Junio, a performance artist and yoga instructor who plays Reyes. Saya Naomi, a drag queen who plays Gia, did make up. But queer performance extends traditional notions of production value beyond craft, where Hollywood clearly outdoes and outspends indie fare, to include sincere, specific cultural performances major studios find elusive. Vogua’s hip hop soundtrack is mostly from Erik “Mister” Wallace, who plays Curtis, along with local DJs Hijo Pródijo and Jeremiah Meece, with a cameo from Cakes Da Killa; Mister Wallace debuted the first single, “Whoremoan,” off her EP, Faggot, on the day of Vogua’s online release. All the artists changed their lines to reflect how they would speak and in particular how queers of color speak to each other.
Before we put it online we premiered Vogua in July 2015 in three Chicago neighborhoods where each of the artists live or work. Kiam hosted their premiere in a loft in Pilsen, known in the queer community for its large stage and for hosting a number of art events and parties. Saya hosted in Wicker Park at an artist-run space near her home, whereas Erik hosted in Lakeview at a bar where she started her career as a host and rapper. Each artist prepared a performance for the premiere. Surveys with guests after the screenings suggested many attendees knew the artists and were diverse in race, gender, sexuality, income and education, though all were under 45. In interviews they expressed a desire to see more of the series with more queer performance (dance, shade, sex) and character development. Meanwhile artists expressed pleasure at seeing their talent showcased among their community, particularly Saya, who got ready for drag in front of the audience, revealing drag’s under-appreciated labor, and said: “I don’t get that kind of support from Chicago people!…This is real. This is respect.”