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 those dancers, 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.

If you can’t make it to the performance, the installation will also be on view in the afternoon throughout Juneteenth weekend. Brown told LAist he also hopes to find a permanent home for the archives and exhibits he’s amassed.

The inspiration behind ‘Sissies’

Normally, projects of this kind involve archival research, and that’s certainly 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 calls the work “autoethnographic” — that’s to say, a big part of what you’ll see is based on his own experiences watching others over the decades.

“ We're talking about vogue, all of the elements: hand performance, floor performance, catwalk, duck walk,” Brown said. “All of those things appear in the work, but it's based on the truth, uh, 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, and, uh, 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 underground parties and warehouse shows.

“ 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.

Many of Brown’s dancers have performed with people like Beyoncé, but they’re also artists doing their own thing. The score for the show is by DJ DeFacto X, a co-founder of Black Bass Collective, a staple of L.A.’s warehouse scene.

“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’s moved when he sees younger people go through the same movements as the voguers and other dancers he used to see in clubs.

“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 kikis and lalas that happen during performance, the authenticity of their visceral connection to each other,” he said.