Dips, Death drops, and duck walks. In the fall of 2022, I started learning vogue dance taught by Damon Green at his studio in Chicago. I had just come out as non-binary and wanted to reclaim my feminine energy. While Madonna's Vogue song made the art form more mainstream, the dance art form itself was started by BIPOC Queer and Trans people as a celebration of their identities and an empowering and rebellious act of rejecting the hate society tried to place on them. On this episode, I invite "mother" Damon Green onto the podcast to talk about his/her/their journey of finding Vogue and how it helped them, as well as what led them to teach Vogue to students in Chicago.

Damon D. Green is a Chicago-based dance artist and founder of TEXTUREDance Studio, an Urban Styles and Forms dance and wellness facility where he spreads his passion for movement education. Green is an avid Vogue aesthetic practitioner, exploring, performing and teaching this form in its fusion with other movement disciplines. Green has collaborated with local choreographers and companies including Red Clay Dance, Paige Cunningham-Calderella, Darrell Jones, J'sun Howard, Philip Elson, Kristina Isabelle, Cecil Johnson Jr., Lional Freeman, Jane Beachy, Mauren Sledge (House of Avant-Garde), Bob Eisen, Molly Shanahan, Sadie Woods, as well as visual artist Faheem Majeed. Green teaches and attends workshops and master classes throughout Chicago as well as abroad. Damon joined The Seldoms in 2007, and has contributed to fourteen major projects. texturedance.com