Our prayers to the gay gods have been answered… Michelle Visage will be voguing to Madonna on this week’s Strictly
Michelle Visage and her Strictly Come Dancing partner Giovanni Pernice. (BBC)
Michelle Visage is about to give the gays – and we cannot stress this enough – everything they want in this weekend’s Strictly Come Dancing.
After landing in the bottom two during last weekend’s Strictly, Visage and her dance partner Giovanni Pernice will bounce back on Saturday by performing a street/commercial routine to Madonna’s ‘Vogue’.
Though details are scant, it seems highly unlikely that Visage would choose the song unless she was going to serve us an authentic voguing routine.
The Drag Race judge was voguing for years before Madonna co-opted the movement for her 1990 single, picking up her stage name (Visage) in the ballrooms of New York because she gave “good face”.
She was a fixture on the scene throughout the early 1980s, and was taught how to vogue by Willi Ninja, star of the seminal documentary Paris is Burning.
“I could out-vogue any female who came for me, and most of the boys too,” she told Dazed in 2015.
Though Visage is a noted Madonna fan, she admitted to being “jealous” when the singer released ‘Vogue’.
“I’d been voguing for the past couple of years and then she released that song and of course she’s going to get the attention for it,” she said.
“She’s going to make it known worldwide when we had been working our arses off in the community and the dance had been around for years. But I also felt excited because the community was getting recognition. It was a double-edged sword.”
An archive video shows Visage voguing with her house father Cesar Valentino.
Voguing has come back into – well – vogue in recent years, thanks to RuPaul’s Drag Race and latterly, the hit series Pose.
Pose‘s second season deals with the aftermath of Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ release, with the characters – like Michelle Visage – finding their community profile raised to new heights.
