Entry · catalog no. 4213
new way
/ /ˌnuː ˈweɪ/ /noo WAY
noun · New York City ballroom · 1990s
✓ Verified
1.
One of the three recognized forms of voguing. New Way is built on hand and arm performance — wrist and finger illusions, tutting, locking — on clicks, meaning limb contortions at the joints that require real hypermobility, and on the mime-like construction of an imaginary shape passed around the dancer own body. Where Old Way is hard angles, symmetry, and the pin, and where Vogue Fem is fluid and exaggeratedly feminine with limp wrists, New Way sits between them: as precise as Old Way, but flexible and built on illusion. Wrists are not limp in Old Way or New Way — that is a Vogue Fem marker, and it is the cleanest way to tell them apart.
“She came out doing New Way and the clicks alone had the room screaming.”
Origin & Attribution
The Black and Latino LGBTQ ballroom scene of New York City — the Harlem drag balls reconstituted as the House system in the late 1970s. Voguing was a programmed category by 1980; New Way emerges after 1990, as voguers came in trained in formal dance, gymnastics, and contortion. The name Old Way is a retronym: it exists only because New Way arrived and something had to be called the other thing. Willi Ninja is often said to have invented New Way. Closer to true: he pioneered and refined the contortionist, precision hand-performance approach that became it. Madonna Vogue, released in 1990, is repeatedly treated as the origin of all of this. It is the crossover, not the source — and the video was choreographed by Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza and Luis Camacho of the House of Xtravaganza, who were doing it long before she called.
1980
Voguing a regularly programmed ball category
1990
Paris Is Burning released; Madonna Vogue takes the crossover
2002
Jonathan David Jackson documents the three forms in the scholarly record
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
New York City ballroom · 1990s
Spoken by
Black and Latino LGBTQ ballroom houses; New York, then the Northeast corridor and beyond
$NEWWAYThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady36 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
55/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1990
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Citations & Sources
■
"The Social World of Voguing," Jonathan David Jackson, Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement 12:2 — scholarship · Autumn 2002
published
■
Paris Is Burning, dir. Jennie Livingston — film · 1990
film
■
Butch Queens Up in Pumps, Marlon M. Bailey — book · 2013
book
■
+ Cite a sourceVoguing and the House Ballroom Scene of New York 1989–92, ed. Stuart Baker — book · 2011
book
See also