Should You Shake Your Tailfeather For The Prancing Elites Project?

What Is This Thing?

The Prancing Elites of Mobile, Alabama are five gay black men with a passion for the dance style known as J-Sette and the determination to perform it in defiance of the deep South bigots and homophobes trying to keep them down.

When Is It On?

Wednesdays at 10 PM on Oxygen.

Why Was It Made Now?

Between Dancing With The Stars, So You Think You Can Dance, Big Freedia: Queen Of Bounce, and even the noxious Dance Moms and Bring It!, we're living in a golden age of reality dance shows. I also have to give a shout-out to Randy Jackson Presents America's Best Dance Crew for featuring the all-black, all-gay crew Vogue Evolution for a TOO-SHORT stint in the show's fourth season. Did I only bring them up so I could embed this clip of their performance during Bollywood Week, which I will use literally any excuse to do? MAYBE, and here it is.

RuPaul's Drag Race also certainly deserves a considerable amount of credit for proving that America can both appreciate gay men's artistry, and be moved by the struggle it requires to get it in front of audiences.

What's Its Pedigree?

The group predates the show by a decade, according to this Vice story from 2014 (and their strategy of occupying their own performance venues, guerrilla-style, persists into the present day if the evidence of the pilot is anything to go by). You could go to the official site of Crazy Legs Productions, which makes the show, and see what else it's done, or you could just trust Laverne Cox's endorsement.

...And?

Something you need to know about me is that I get really emotional watching dance. Even -- or especially -- when the dancers are exuberant and joyful, it just strums something in me that I can't really explain. Whether it's a Broadway show or a B-Boy dance-off clip on YouTube or Bring It On, I will cry.

The other form of musical expression that was formative to me personally is marching band (sorry, everyone: I'm taken). And since J-Setting was originally part of halftime shows at historically black colleges, this intersection of dancing and marching would already have me hooked no matter who was doing it...

...but the members of the Prancing Elite are five extremely charismatic gay men whose identities and attitudes have been forged by pervasive and inescapable societal disapproval of everything they are about. Being underdogs' underdogs hasn't stalled their drive to show the public what they can do because they can't be anything other than what they are. They can't even lower their voices in a restaurant when their agent asks them to. You take the Prancing Elite out for burgers and they're going to yell fond insults across the table, SUZANNE. Deal with it!

It's impossible to choose a favourite because each of the Elites is a goddamn delight in his/her own way. But if I had to narrow it down to one...it would be two.

Kentrell is the founder of the Elites and its captain. He's not really interested in your input, Adrian, just do it the way he showed you. Jerel, hanging out chez Kentrell, rhetorically asks what kind of person puts up a "big-ass poster" of himself in his own room.

"Kentrell!" - Kentrell.

And then there's Tim.

I rest my case. To be fair, they're really ALL eminently giffable. I mean, this is a TH in which Kentrell, Adrian, and Jerel plotz about meeting Nene Leakes of The Real Housewives Of Atlanta, of all people.

Even if the only story here was that the Prancing Elites are fucking badass dancers who astonish and delight everyone who's lucky enough to see them, I would at the very least choke up watching their performance and snickering at their rehearsal snaps.

...But?

But, of course, there's more to their story than that, because they live in Mobile, where their "non-gender-conforming" mode of dress and behaviour when they aren't performing, and their appropriation of what has typically been a feminine style of dance, have apparently not earned them a ton of supporters -- or at least not a lot who live locally. As much as I was enjoying getting to know the Elites through the first episode, I was about three-quarters of the way through when I noticed how long it had been since we actually saw them do any dancing, which is about when we came to a (clearly staged) scene in which they go to their agent Suzanne's office, and she informs them that they've been refused entry into three parades in nearby towns, on the basis that they're events for families and the local ignorant parents don't want to have to explain to their kids what genderqueer is. (I'm paraphrasing.) So Kentrell makes a declaration (also clearly staged): Suzanne can wait for Saraland to join the twentieth century, but the Elites aren't going to sit around hoping to be approved. Instead, they're going to go to the parade and perform anyway, permit or no.

And just as I'm getting annoyed at what seems like manufactured conflict for the purpose of showing how the Elites carve out their own space in this very intolerant region, they get to Saraland, start making their way to the parade route in their spangly leotards, and immediately get stopped by a couple of local cops who I guess recognize them from the news. Kentrell patiently says they won't try to be in the parade; they'll just dance alongside it on a part of the roadside where, as citizens, they're as entitled to be as anyone else. But they haven't even started doing anything but walk along the sidewalk before they start getting abused by bigoted bystanders who apparently have no compunction yelling things like "You ain't no woman!" and "Y'all need Jesus!" on camera. None of these assholes' faces are blurred in the screener which means either that their identities are going to be concealed in post in the version that actually airs, or that they all totally signed the show's release forms because they didn't think they were doing anything wrong.

"We just wanna dance. And at the end of the day, we're gonna dance, whether you like it or not." FUCKIN' A RIGHT, KENTRELL.

After the Elites have delivered their unpermitted performance and made their point, they do meet a few Saraland citizens who support them and are ashamed of their neighbours' slurs and abuse. When Kentrell reminds a little girl, as she cries, that Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks fought for people's rights and that's what the Prancing Elites do too, it kind of feels like a reach, but it also kind of doesn't. As a naïve Canadian, I was really shocked by how open the parade-route homophobes were in their attacks (which is not to say that there aren't also bigots in Canada, but like, there are only three, and everyone knows Jim, Jeff, and Sabrina and they at least just keep their talk behind people's backs). The last act of the Prancing Elites pilot is so appalling in its portrayal of attitudes that I usually assume have gone extinct that it's basically like the American version HBO's Pussy Riot documentary to me.

...So?

The hate crime aspect of it is hard to watch, and the Elites' oppression by the small-minded board members of their various local parades is keeping them from dancing, and thus keeping us from watching them dance. So I feel it's important for all of us to make this show a hit not just to validate the Elites' art but to make their inclusion in future parades undeniable!