Dancing with Pride takes an inner look at the close relationship between the LGBTQ+ community and dance. Through a contemporary short film collection and archival videos from the 1990s NYC ballroom scene, The OutMuseum invites you to check out these film works from all over the world, centering dancing as an element through which queer and trans characters express and explore their own identities.
 
The queer community has long embraced dancing and dance culture as a form of self-expression and celebration. Dance clubs and parties have provided a safe and accepting space for LGBTQ+ community members. The dancing gesture can take the form of survival, liberation, and even a way of coming out. Since words are restricted, the bodies throughout these short films speak their own languages. In the spirit of showing themselves to the world in this new language, the characters through these films choose to dance. Despite the oppressive environments they face in daily life, they finally find the freedom to express themselves through movement, along with music.

The works in this series engage with the complexity of community history in close correlation with dance. Through their movements, we invite you to see their agency, identity, and acts of nonconformity. They dance with anger, and joy, with the hope that the obstinate social norms around gender and/or sexual orientations will one day be removed. And these amazing scenes of dance remind us again and again how the whole community is connected all the time, across experiences and identities.

Guest curated by Shu Wang

SHU WANG (she/her) is currently a distribution and exhibition associate at Third World Newsreel, a media arts organization that fosters the creation, appreciation, preservation, and dissemination of independent film and video by and about people of color and social justice issues. With her background in film studies and interest in BIPOC and queer cinema, she worked with the OutFest, Women Make Movies, Flaherty Film Seminar, Shanghai Queer Film Festival, and so on.