Ball at Bożena’s

“The first balls were organised in the United States in the late 19th century, but the rise of ballroom culture came in the 1970s. Before Jennie Livingston made a documentary about the members and members of this culture and Madonna invited several of them to participate in the video for her song “Vogue”, the ballroom remained in the underground. By bringing together queer people of different skin colours, it was a form of coping with socio-cultural oppression – homophobia, racism or class discrimination. Each performance, where participants competed in specific categories, was a manifestation of rebellion against the system. The Ballroom offered freedom, a sense of belonging and a chance to live exclusively on one’s own terms, if only for a moment. Balls were not only culture- but also family-forming. In the 1980s, homes with structures that mimicked the traditional ones – a mother and father, sometimes two fathers or two mothers, were created around them. They became substitutes for the biological families that queer kids were deprived of – they were thrown out of their homes or ran away from them themselves. By joining the “house”, they gained new parents, brothers and sisters. They took on a new identity, a new name. At the balls, they could become whoever they wanted: a successful business woman, a stage star, a model.
Wydrowska organised her first Ball at Bożena’s in 2016 at the Chmury club in Warsaw. Two years earlier, she had been accepted at New York’s prestigious Royal House of Milan, which gave her an inside look at ballroom culture and, she says, gave her the necessary tools to build it from the ground up in Poland. At the inaugural Ball at Bożena’s, her children – her protégés, students and friends – have already competed. 2019 marks the start of Kiki House of Sarmata, where she acts as mother, mentor and nurturer.”
Source: Michalina Murawska, “Long live the ball”, Vogue, 26.06.2022, https://www.vogue.pl/a/bozena-wydrowska-prekursorka-polskiego-ballroomu