"Waacking is a way of creating a character, telling stories, and reinventing yourself. When you're dancing, you're a princess." And so it was that dancer and choreographer Josépha Madoki crowned herself "Princess" Madoki. It's a noble title that she wears with grace and a big smile, as she extolled the virtues of this liberating dance. "I found myself as a woman and an artist thanks to waacking," she said. "It highlights femininity, no matter what gender a person is."

Madoki, 42, who is set to perform her show D.I.S.C.O. – Don't Initiate Social Contact with Others, as well as a waacking battle from April 26 to 28 at Paris' Musée d'Orsay, owes this amplified version of herself to a shock. In 2005, she took part in the renowned Juste Debout dance battle competition in Paris, having learned a variety of dance styles since the age of 10, including jazz, hip-hop and ballet. One of the competition's judges, Japanese street dance champion Yoshie Koda, performed a demo in which she included some waacking moves. "I was blown away by her arm work," she said adding: "I genuinely wondered how she was doing it. That was the beginning of my love for this style."

Where did "waacking" come from? It emerged in the 1970s, from the heart of Los Angeles' nightclubs, where the mostly Black and Latine gay community sought refuge. "They had found a safe space to express themselves," said Madoki. "They created this glamorous dance inspired by Hollywood cinema and its stars, like Greta Garbo and Marilyn Monroe; but also by cartoons and martial arts, which these men, most of whom were very young, enjoyed."

With tremendous arm velocity, the movements of waacking soar to the beat of disco tunes. "It was, among other things, the way nunchaku are used that inspired these gestures," she continued, referring to flexible martial arts fighting sticks: "Nothing comes out of nowhere." As for the word "wack," it covers two things: An onomatopoeia drawn from comic books, representing a blow landing with force; and a slang term meaning "weird." These two influences, particularly the second, gave the movement its name. "It had been an insult against the gay community, which flipped the term around by making it positive."

Although AIDS decimated American waackers in the 1980s, the dance style nevertheless made a comeback two decades later. "The survivors had nowhere to go, and no appetite for dancing," she said. Fortunately, some, like historic figure Tyrone Proctor (1953-2020), continued to pass down the art. In 2014, Madoki went to meet him in Los Angeles and attended his classes. I talked with him a lot, because this is a culture that is preserved orally."

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