Our ball competitions take place at the extravagant George Peabody Library. Known as Baltimore’s “Cathedral of Books,” it is consistently ranked amongst the most beautiful libraries in the world. When it opened its doors in 1878, founder George Peabody intended the Library “to be well furnished in every department of knowledge and of the most approved books of the day.” We continue this legacy by staging the forms of knowledge created via arts and performance.

Ball competitions are ritual performances that call forth black and LGBTQ cultural traditions. The electronic music derives from modern progressions of the African drum, and is influenced by blues, jazz, gospel, and funk. Voguing, an improvised dance form, participates in a wide variety of black diasporic sonic and movement practices. Commentators, or masters of ceremony, are griots: the living archive of the community’s cultural knowledge. Above all, cultural critic madison moore argues, ballroom is a space “where queer people of color have removed themselves from the gendered and racist politics of everyday life and created their own unique social worlds, allowing them to live out alternative versions of sexuality and gender performance.”