The origin of the Mexican Ballroom Scene (MBS) in 2015 is a testament to its resilience, adaptability, and peripheral nature. According to formal and informal sources, the first impulse for generating the Ballroom Culture in Mexico City was thanks to a transnational mechanism (Faist, 2010) that mirrored European developments. It is said that a member of the Iconic House of Labeija [1]came to share and teach their Ballroom Culture knowledge, with the subsequent intention of opening a chapter (franchise) in Mexico City. However, the House of Apocalistick (HoA), the initiator of the Ballroom Culture in Mexico City, chose a different path, one of self-determination. This decision was a bold move, involving the deconstruction, renaming of the given Ballroom family structures, and attempting to popularise the essential knowledge of the Ballroom Culture to the public. Thus, in In Every Dip, a Tear: Nine Years of Ballroom Culture as Queer Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Heart of Mexico City, the curatorial transdisciplinary narrative celebrates the resilience and adaptability that characterises the MBS and its complex relationship with the market landscape of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) from a Western perception. The exhibition is a testament to Ballroom Culture’s inclusive and community-building nature (McNeely, 1999). The project incorporates a curatorial approach to critical cultural studies, gender studies, and social sciences to provide a theoretical foundation for the project’s methodology and objectives.

Firstly, according to Critical Cultural Studies, in agreement with Chao (2023), ‘culture is central to the production of visibility’. Under this statement, it is relevant to discuss ICH core precepts such as cultural policies (Duvelle, 2014), universality, cultural diversity, and globalisation (Lazaro and Jimenez, 2021) from a critical perspective (Gore, 2023). Hence, in consideration of this theoretical framework, ‘a cosmopolitan stance that embraces all cultures and considers all dances as equally significant while challenges the notion of dances being unrooted and encourages appropriation of dances from the cosmopolitan world’ (Chao, Karoblis and Povedak, 2023). It can transmit implications such as ‘kinship, tourism, communitarianism, national-cultural identities, and geopolitical factors’ (Ibid) understood by institutions, governments, and general society to gain the recognition of all queer culture manifestations.

Secondly, according to Gomes ‘The term ‘Queer Theory’, as originally used in the United States, may refer to a critical and counter-normal gaze that served as a common denominator for a vast and diverse cross-section of academic production. But it was not only in the United States that people connected to gender and sexuality studies sought the works of Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, and Wittig – among others – to create a counter-discourse’, (2019, p. 48). Hence, considering that there is no other alternative better that employs Queer theory to enhance ICH’s critical perspective approach to apply to this curatorial project specifically. In agreement with Gomes (2019), he points out Queerness as the reinvention and reconstruction of queer genealogy and, therefore, rejects its pretensions to universality. Thus, ‘Queerness as an epistemological movement implies a conscious abdication of authority, and it insinuates itself as impure and improbable to link to the interpellation of multitudes of dissident bodies, which calls itself into question, and that takes seriously the risk of transforming itself’ (Ibid).

Thirdly, from Social Sciences, an Ethnographic and Anthropological perspective throughout observations in urban settings pose unique challenges, particularly when exploring MBS activities with as follows: 1) Analysis of literature material and previous research studies to provide firsthand experiences and insights into sociocultural backgrounds, complementing theoretical knowledge. 2) Digital Archiving: Visual Ethnography (Pink, 2014). Understanding the impact of digital data and its integration into research practice is crucial for contemporary visual ethnography. 3) Interviews: Open-ended Semi-structured (Skinner, 2012) and Elicitation (Gore & Mæland, 2015) conducted face-to-face and online. The aim is that these interviews facilitated an in-depth exploration of subjective experiences and perspectives about contextual facts about the MBS and its dissemination practices. From an ethnographic perspective, collaborative dialogues are archived through knowledge of previous sociocultural backgrounds, enhancing the richness of data collected for the exhibition. Overall, this theoretical framework used in this curatorial project provides a comprehensive understanding of MBS, combining immersive experiences, digital documentation, and in-depth interviews to capture the complexity of social dynamics and subjective experiences within this community.

Finally, to realise the project demands a transdisciplinary perspective due to the combination of studies. Thus, as Lehnerer mentions, transdisciplinarity like performing art can also be added to research activities. Lehnerer (2013) affirms, ‘in a museal context, the transdisciplinary curation of performing arts increasingly requires adapting the structures’. Even with the negotiation between the institutions, the material collected for the construction of the exhibition will be collected with the advice of experts and authors, and the selection of the material collected after the ethnographic experience will be done with the collaboration of community members. The project expects to give a result through Ballroom Public Practices (BPP) that are going to poured into an inside-outside, that is, an inside of the institutional-artistic system, outside the constraints they offer to preserve queer nature.

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[1] For more information visit: https://umsi580.lsait.lsa.umich.edu/s/a-history-of-ballroom-documenting-the-era-of-ballroom-1972-1990/page/le