The Brooklyn Academy of Music Cinemetheque will be screening Having a Ball on October 23, 2025.
“Having a Ball!” profiles the supportive, hugely creative LGBTQ+ family that formed around Chicago’s House of Avant Garde as they prepare for one of the city’s most legendary balls, The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre Ball. The film, created by Stephanie Coleman in the early 1990s, features astonishing footage of Chicago’s ballroom scenes and lovely, intimate interviews with members of the House of Avant Garde.
FLUXX is a unique Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) program curated by multidisciplinary artist Osadolor that situates Blackqueer creatives utilizing Lo-Fi and D-I-Y audiovisual aesthetics in the artistic continuum of the Black Diaspora.
In their thesis, which won the 2024 Kennell Jackson Jr. Award at Stanford University, Osadolor argues that Lo-Fi and D-I-Y aesthetics, especially in audiovisual productions, can be an Afropresentist tool for Blackqueer folks to reimagine their sense of self, community, and relationship with their cultural memory, the everyday present, and envisioning the future.
Lo-Fi and D-I-Y’s audiovisual aesthetic provides Blackqueer folks the agency to reveal and remain pixelated, shaky, blurry, inaudible, elusive, and abstract in their endless process of self-becoming.
Through this dynamic, engaging, and multi-focus program, Osadolor showcases the research, thoughts, and works of audiovisual art that give breadth to the complexity of Black folks actively reflecting on, building, and imagining the potential of life, even in its nuanced mundanity.
Stephanie Coleman and Aaron Pierre Brown of the House of Avant Garde will be in attendance.
The screening takes place Thursday, October 23, 2025 beginning at 7 p.m. at BAM, 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11217.
You can also watch Having a Ball! with the House of Avant Garde at mediaburn.org/video/having-a-ball-with-the-house-of-avant-garde.
