EntreCuerpos: Intentions & Research
These notes accompany the work as a way of documenting EntreCuerpos' narrative, political resonance, and creative process.
The encounter between flamenco and Vogue brings into dialogue two very different yet deeply connected corporealities and embodiments. This opens an imaginary where intimate dimensions, projections, dreams, resilience and inner conflicts that traverse feminine identities manifest.
EntreCuerpos is a series of living tales moving through plural and ever-transforming feminine identities. The triptych unfolds through three transformative tales: awakening & enlightenment, empowerment, and celebration.
1. Awakening & enlightenment (Tarantos)
The bata de cola enters as a central material in this first state.
When I wear it, my body immediately enters a feminine embodiment. At the same time, it introduces weight, constraint and adaptation. Working with it, I become aware of how my body constantly adjusts and reorganises itself in relation to the fabric.
I sense my body differently, shaped by what I carry and by the necessity to move through it.
The bata de cola becomes a space of transformation: working through it, I protect, constrain, assert my body. A chameleon quality comes through this constant adaptation.
I enter a chrysalis state, where my hands and arms become vessels to give grace to the art of flamenco braceo and Vogue. I explore this chrysalis state with Tarantos, a rare palo of jondo lineage. The introduction with arpeggiated chords reveals a mineral density, raw, deep, and luminous. My hands become a primary form of expression, speaking outward.
I awaken to the energy in my hands and arms, to the intentions and sensations moving through them, to the architectures they shape. I sculpt the unknown and open new possibilities of expression. This becomes a gestational space for creation, raw and luminous.
Chrysalis unfolding initiates this phase of awakening. I enter this state through walking, my body moves close to the ground in contained and precise steps: the duck walk, an element of Vogue. In New Way Vogue, I embody it as the geisha walk, carried through the lineage of Willi Ninja and seen in Paris Is Burning. I move with a tremolo texture in the guitar to extend the delicacy of the movement. I let my hands lead as my wrists articulate, curve and open.
The bata de cola extends the geisha walk, tracing a calligraphy in space, with the walk and the fabric tail moving in alignment.
When the Tarantos cante (singing) begins, my body gathers into a grounded verticality. I turn inward, searching for a deeper strength carried through my body, reaching toward something older within the feminine lineage I carry.
Tarantos, born in the mines of Almería, speak of effort, solitude and endurance. The compás moves forward with an earthy gravity.
In this sequence, I explore my silhouette as a chivalric figure. I search for a presence that holds vulnerability and strength, alert and unyielding.
With this intention, I move along a horizontal line, through a two-dimensional writing of the body. My arms become blades, referencing how my ballroom father Icon Jamal Milan names arms in classic Vogue performance, drawing from martial arts.
Arms lines and angular shapes extend into the bata de cola, continuing the trajectory and drawing arcs through space. I meet its weight as a burden and move forward through resistance.
In the zapateado section, musicality shifts and I embody other femininities, playful, both performed and chosen for pleasure. I interlace the fabric, shaping it through my body to create new angles and silhouettes. The fabric becomes active in the movement. I play with it through touch, caress, and entanglement. I open and close it, letting it move across my body and define how I position myself.
I work with the bata de cola as it alters the shape of my body. The walk becomes an ode to ballroom runway. I move between European runway and American runway, carrying a feminine embodiment in the first and a masculine one in the second. I work through diagonal lines into European runway and then bring my body into a more vertical structure in American runway. The steps become deliberate, settling into posing, each position defining a new image.
I transform my silhouette by changing its volume and weight, letting it stretch, collapse, or sharpen. The bata de cola redirects how my body is read until it appears as mantle, train, or camouflage.
The bata de cola gathers and shifts around me as I play with it. My silhouette distorts, almost like a small creature. Flamenco hands appear through the fabric in a playful, almost childlike state, before my body disappears completely.
From the cocoon, a leg slowly emerges, then another, vertical and delicate, like a flower unfolding. My body opens and closes before expanding fully into a sacred dip, the ecstatic punctuation of Vogue. In that moment, the dip holds an intimate and almost devotional intensity.
The sequence moves into an ode to New Way Vogue floor performance. Across the ground, my body is contorted, fully inhabiting its sensual force. Flamenco braceo continues through my arms, meeting the lines of Vogue.
The sequence settles into one final image: a Kansai dip from Classic Performance. The crown of my head meets the floor, one palm grounding my body, one leg extending toward the sky. From this grounded position, I rise, opening the path toward the Seguiriya.
In Tarantos, the bata de cola opens a space of metamorphosis. The train carries weight, protection, play, sensuality and projection.
2. Fierceness & Empowerment (Seguiriya)
When I remove the bata de cola, the chrysalis gives way. My silhouette sheds its extension, and my presence settles into a more deliberate verticality. This shift brings the Seguiriya. The a cappella opening fills the space with density.
Putting on the bolero frames my torso and sharpens the line of my body. I reclaim space and time.
In EntreCuerpos, I bring Vogue Arms Control into encounter with the Seguiriya. Sustained only by cajón, the Seguiriya arrives in its raw intensity. I introduce Arms Control here.
In ballroom culture, Arms Control and Hands Performance depend on an immediate relation to rhythm. Lines, angles, rotations and illusions are written in real time, and the arms and hands carry the narrative alone, becoming the centre of the performance.
Giving visibility to this rare art form in a public theatrical space, telling a story only with my arms while standing still in the Seguiriya, becomes a political gesture.
The encounter with the Seguiriya sharpens this writing: its five-beat structure demands mastery and control. I confront myself through technique.
The red gloves emphasise the fire and determination that rise through my body. In ballroom, gloves concentrate the gaze on the hand and amplify articulation.
Through this encounter, an ecstatic moment of fierceness moves through my arms.
3. Celebration & Pride (Tangos de Graná)
With the Tangos de Graná, the body enters a moment of celebration. The rhythm in the hips invites play and sensuality.
New Way Vogue and Tangos de Graná are expressions where elegance, grace and individuality are celebrated. Tangos letras (lyrics) can speak of seduction and play.
Los lunares de tu vestío | The polka dots of your dress
relucen como luceros | shine like bright stars
cuando sales a bailar. | when you step out to dance.
Y burracana, burracana, | And mischevious girl,
que veinte reales me costaste, | you cost me twenty reales,
y por aquel cantillo de agua | and by that little stream
pa que tú sepas que yo bien te camelo. | so that you know how much I desire you.
Si quieres saber | If you want to know
los pasos que doy | The steps I take
pasito que doy | Little step I make
vente tras de mí | Come behind me
que a Triana voy | Because I'm going to Triana
I wear a red one-piece jumpsuit with a bolero structured through a single sleeve and defined shoulders, with long fringes running along the body and arm. As my arms play with rotations and angles, the fringes extend the gesture, amplifying its sensuality.
The final Vogue Fem dip holds a moment of surrender and unapologetic feminine presence, drawing from the lineage of Fem Queen performance shaped by Black and Latinx trans women within ballroom culture. In that instant, the body celebrates feminine expression in its fullest intensity.
In a social landscape where images of femininity are constantly shaped and regulated, embodying feminine mutations questions how these identities inhabit public space and how they continue to exist within private space.
Across social and cultural contexts, femininity rarely appears as a fixed form, it shifts through social, symbolic, corporeal and performative changes that continually reshape how bodies inhabit space.
In EntreCuerpos, these metamorphoses unfold through textile elements, dance and music. My body inhabits different states - playfulness, seduction, resilience, defiance, sovereignty - allowing these feminine qualities to appear and circulate through dance.
The work follows a cycle that echoes biological metamorphosis and the notion of mue becomes central to the work: chrysalis, emergence, mue. At first the body senses space differently, discovering new relations between dance and textile elements. The bata de cola and costume surrounds and extends the body, creating a shifting textile landscape where the body adapts and experiments with new forms, across flamenco palos/rhythms transformations.
Ballroom and flamenco resonate within this process. Ballroom emerged as a space created by bodies that had been rendered invisible and marginalised, particularly within queer and racialised communities, offering a space where femininities can be embodied and reclaimed. In flamenco, the feminine body is authentic and raw, non-conforming to fixed or expected images, sometimes resisting them, sometimes amplifying certain gender codes. The richness of the repertoire reveals a wide spectrum of feminine expressions.