From 'Paris' to the World: 'Kiki' and the New Scene

The joy of video on demand is that you can access hard-to-find, barely released, festival-only films immediately from the comfort of your couch. Movies that would have had to trickle down through the endless festival circuit to (maybe) play on a tiny screen in the indie-est of theaters in your town is a thing of the past.

Kiki, a 2016 feature-length doc on the latest version of the New York City ball scene is now on iTunes, the same day it was released in a few theaters in major markets. Now, if you're in tumbleweed Nebraska, you can still watch this document of the lives of 21st century QPOC (queer people of color) concurrently, not years later as a time capsule. Kiki's obvious predecessor/godmother was Paris is Burning, which went from festival to tiny theatrical run to gathering a long, growing cult audience, years and then decades after release. It made the journey from clunky videotapes to DVDs and then streaming.

Both Kiki and Paris follow the ball community in NYC but decades apart. Whereas Paris was almost a worldwide debut of a movement for anyone outside of this small but tight NYC QPOC community, Kiki is a continuation of a scene that has reached, if not mainstream, than a much larger audience.

The ballroom scene, now dubbed "Kiki" by the new generation, still has houses like decades before but the immediate world around them has more of a present, but still fragile, support system, unlike the outsider and secluded world of Paris's 1980s isolation.

Although Kiki has a little less emphasis on the flashy ball performances and scathing judging of Paris and more on the contestants' daytime lives as social workers and activists, maybe that's not such a bad thing. Well-rounded human portraits of the lives of these young adults may be what takes Kiki from the "look at me"/"look at this world" voyeurism of Paris to the "how can we change our circumstance?" and "how can we get drag/vogue/kiki established as a long-term cultural expression from POC?" much like jazz and hip-hop have done for decades.

The sophistication and order of the costumes, dancing, and expression is elevated from the rough-around-the-edges world of the mid '80s. Empowerment, education, and activism have come closer to the center of the lives of the Kiki kids.

While that may dampen the excitement audiences found in the raw thrill of the Paris ball scenes, in Kiki it shows the challenges QPOC young adults and teens face, up front and center. These challenges make the kids of Kiki feel truly real.