Waacking, a dance style popularised by Black and Latino communities in the United States, has found a home in Tāmaki Makaurau. For Pride Month, PROWL Productions brought PROWL Fest to the city, featuring open rehearsals, workshops, and battles celebrating the street dance style.
The festival marks the first time Māori multidisciplinary artist Hayley Walters-Tekahika (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Whātua) and her team have produced an event of this kind.
“PROWL Fest is about community, it’s about celebration, it’s about coming together, it’s about being witnessed, it’s about witnessing, it’s about exploring, [and] going deeper.
“For me, there was a deep need and desire to spread the dance style of waacking out, out to the open.
“So I want to see more people do waacking or perform waacking or experience waacking, and through this festival, it’s to show that it doesn’t have to look like one thing,” said Walters-Tekahika.
It’s a form of storytelling, utilising their arms to showcase something that indigenous communities have done through dance for centuries.
“As Indigenous people, as Pasifika people, we’re storytellers, we tell our stories, we hold our stories. With waacking and having that drag queen element or influence, being influenced by silent films, that’s how they tell their stories with their arms, with their hands as well. It’s how they’re scared, it’s how they’re happy, and so yeah, that intersection’s really, really beautiful,” she told Te Ao Māori News.
Waacking originated in Los Angeles gay clubs during the 1970s disco era. It emerged as part of a dance style known as punking, with “punk” being a derogatory term used against gay men at the time.
The style nearly became extinct during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, before being revitalised in the early 2000s by Brian ‘Footwork’ Green, who went on to teach a new generation of dancers.
Waacking should not be confused with voguing, which originated from the Ballroom scene on the East Coast of the United States.
Today, waacking is a global street dance form that remains especially popular within queer and POC communities.
“It’s like one of the only spaces where I feel my tinana, my hinengaro, my wairua, all fully merged and as one. Whereas a lot of different spaces in my life, it’s like one or the other,” said dancer Ehetere Rua (Ngāi te Rangi, Ngāti Ranginui).
The festival is culminating with Walters-Tekahika and her group bringing back their award-winning street dance-theatre work ‘PROWL’, revamped for Pride at Central Auckland on the last two days of February.
“This is our third season of doing this show, and this one is even better, even more extravagant, and yeah. Through our process, we’ve gone through a really big journey of deepening the whakaaro around it; it’s definitely worth coming,” dancer Ella Rerekura (Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi, Ngāi te Rangi, Ngāti Tūwharetoa) explained.
