The House of Alexander – Meanjin’s (Brisbane) pioneering ballroom house – are taking over Brisbane’s The Tivoli for a one-night-only extravaganza, providing Brisbane Festival with the opportunity to see fem queens, butch queens, and every queen in between vogue their way through glamorous categories over the course of the night.
Being Brisbane’s premier ballroom house, The House of Alexander has been providing its members with a sense of community since its establishment in 2019. And this is something that House Mother Ella Ganza prides herself on.
Ella Ganza explains, “I am a proud trans woman of colour; I’m of Samoan and Māori descent; I am the mother of the founding house here in Meanjin, The House of Alexander; and I’m a fem queen. And I’m all about fostering spaces for our fellow queer people of colour (POC) – specifically trans folk – and using the ballroom culture to help navigate through issues, but also to help our queer POCs with things like confidence.”
She then goes on to say that, since dedicated spaces for queer people of colour are few and far between, the House of Alexander acts as a tether for the community.
She elaborates, “Specifically here, in Meanjin there is no real space that is dedicated to queer people of colour. So ballroom is the one space that connects a lot of us together to be able to celebrate our own existence and our identities.”
“It’s created by us, for us.”
A house known for their glitz and their glam, The House of Alexander promises to bring all that to their performance at The Tivoli for Brisbane Festival. But they also promise to bring to life a richer conversation about life as a queer person of colour today.
Describing the experience, Ella says, “expect, of course, to see the glitz and the glam, expect to see a lot of fashion, and expect to see a lot of high intensity choreography and electrifying movements.”
“But another part of the journey are conversations we wanted to explore, like the harsh realities of what it means to be queer, and the extra layer of being a person of colour; having to deal with racism, the realities of life, specifically the struggles that we, as trans women, face when finding love without being fetishised.”
Ultimately, the performance will provide audiences with, “an in-depth, thorough journey through what we go through from day to day in our life,” Ella says.
Throughout the night, expect to be wowed with a number of categories, including, “‘virgin’, for those who have been voguing for two years or less; ‘realness’, for butch queens and trans men; ‘realness’ for our fem queens; ‘pop, dip, and spin’, which is old-way vogue; ‘sex siren’, which is all about selling the essence of sex; ‘face OTA’, which is all about serving face’; ‘runway’; ‘butch queen vogue fem’, which is all the voguers and all the butch queens; ‘commentator vs commentator’, which is all the people on the mic that chant; ‘best dressed’, which is about the best style of fashion; then we’ve got ‘bizarre’, which is an absurd fashion category.”
“And the last category,” she says, “is ‘vogue fem team performance’, which is a team performance category.”
The House of Alexander’s one-night-only extravaganza plays The Tivoli 24 September as part of Brisbane Festival.
