Five-year University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) undergrad Michael Ramirez used the term while giving the audience a tour of Hull House, the community settlement that Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr began in Chicago in 1889. Ramirez’s tour focused on Hull House’s queer history, including that of many social reformers it hosted. Addams herself is thought to have had a female partner, Mary Rozet Smith, and Ramirez read a poem where Addams addressed the love they had made outside of traditional norms.
The evening continued in the residents dining hall of Hull House, where activist Benji Hart performed a piece that was a mix of spoken word and dance that a panel of UIC academics discussed afterward. Amy Mall, Hull House’s interim program director, introduced Hart by saying when she originally viewed “Dancer As Insurgent,” she left “feeling more brave.”
Hart began his piece by hearkening back to the idea of chosen family as he invoked both styles of dance that inspired vogue and vogue dancers who came before him. As he spoke he was often in motion, his hands twirling. He recited a series of dance steps interspersed with both movement and invocations such as “forget the difference between dancing and moving,” and “form the body into something else other than the site of someone else’s desire.”
As Hart danced, the audience was invited to create responses on slips of paper passed out before the performance. At evening’s end, those responses were tacked on a bulletin board in full view of everyone. Hart finished to thunderous applause.
During the panel discussion, Hart said “Dancer as Insurgent” was created at the end of his college career, in an environment where he felt his community wasn’t actually present. Many audience members commented on Hart’s reclamation of language and what they felt was his ability to use movement to transcend oppression.
In response to an audience member’s impassioned query about how she could work against the systems of oppression in her work as a teacher, Hart discussed vogue’s root dances and how those dances were themselves rooted in movements found in African slave labor. He advised her to focus on repetitive or loathsome things in her everyday routine to change where the source of her power. “When you imbue those motions with your own meaning,” Hart said, “you become powerful.”