It’s an art show, but it’s also the club, and a celebration of LA’s Black queer dance scene

Bernard Brown grew up going to parties all around Los Angeles. Maybe a little before he was supposed to.

“I won't say my age. I don't wanna get nobody in trouble,” he joked. “But I went to clubs like The Catch — The Catch One — and The Study on Hollywood and Western and places like that that are no longer with us.”

Brown went on to become a contemporary dancer and choreographer, and he remembers watching dancers at Black queer clubs, and the tenderness they had for each other. He told LAist that was exactly what informed his new art installation and dance performance, “Sissies: Something Perfect Between Ourselves,” at the Pieter Performance Space this Juneteenth weekend.

“ I thought a lot about how intergenerational learning was starting to slip away, and what does it mean to learn how to be a Black queer person?” Brown said. “Where are those spaces, and how did I learn how to be this way? And so making this work has been about this labor, this love, this intergenerational learning, and also community.”

What to expect

“Sissies” has two components: an installation on view Friday through Sunday, and a dance performance featuring some of L.A.’s most prominent dancers and voguers this Saturday night at 8:30 p.m.

Rosalie Tucker, director of Pieter Performance Space, said this will look a little different from other dance performances you may have been to.

“The invitation to everyone who is a guest in the show, who has bought a ticket is: Let it go,” she said. “Let yourself be in the club. React. You don't have to be quiet. This isn't a silent setting. This is not a traditional theater setting, and that is intentional.”

That’ll culminate after the performance, when the audience will also be invited to join the dancefloor.

Though the installation is this weekend only, Brown told LAist that once it's over, he hopes to find a permanent home for the archives and exhibits he’s amassed.

The inspiration behind ‘Sissies’

Of course, archival research is a big part of the work. But for Brown, who was actually there at clubs watching vogue practitioners work the dancefloor, the research process looks a little different.

Brown, who teaches dance at UC San Diego, calls the work “autoethnographic” — that is, much of what you’ll see is based on his own experiences and observations over the decades.

“ We're talking about vogue, all of the elements: hand performance, floor performance, catwalk, duckwalk,” Brown said. “All of those things appear in the work, but it's based on the truth and the authenticity of our people.”

The themes in Brown’s work resonated with Tucker, especially in this political moment.

“What we're seeing is our histories being not just erased, but violently erased, excluded and lied about,” she said. “So we really have, I think, a responsibility to the future, to ourselves, to claim the truth of, 'This is what happened then, this is what's happening now.'”

Brown’s collaborators

Los Angeles has a long history of queer Black underground clubs and events, one that continues to this day in parties and warehouses.

“ Bernard has built this with the people who are the Black underground in Los Angeles as well, so it's not just like a theoretical thing,” Tucker said.

The score for the show is by DeFacto X, who co-founded Black Bass Collective, a staple of L.A.’s warehouse scene. Co-creator and visual director Malachi Middleton will also perform in the work. Some of Brown’s dancers have shared stages with people like Beyoncé, but he said they’re all also movers and shakers in their own right.

“They are creating their own work,” Brown said. “They are making spaces where people congregate, and they're doing the Lord's work in that regard, finding their way to the movement of our queer ancestors.”

Though Brown won’t be performing in the show, he said he gets emotional when he sees younger generations go through the same movements as the voguers and other dancers he saw in clubs decades ago.

“I am filled with joy — literal joy — and sometimes tears at how beautiful it is to see Black queer men being together intimately, folding into each other, their individual kiki's and lala's that happen during performance, the authenticity of their visceral connection to each other,” he said.