ABOUT
The Ovahness Ball was founded by Icon Sean/Milan™Garçon for REACH LA in 2006 and was the first Ball on the West Coast to provide the Ballroom community with linked health and wellness resources addressing HIV prevention and care. Icon Sean Milan Garçon chose the name “Ovahness Ball” as an ode to now Ballroom Icon Thaddeus Gorgeous Gucci (formerly known as Thaddeus Ovaness) and to represent an upcoming era in the Ballroom scene where you are encouraged to bring your best self to the runway; the self that you aspire to be, and the ideal that you walk for the love of community, the celebration of resilience, and the manifestation of greatness existing in you and your connection to community. It was founded during an era that existed before prize money was the motivating force and creativity was queen!!!! Organized to be inclusive of all houses, house parents, and kids rather than being sponsored by a single house, Ovahness attempted to tamp down (the sometimes-messy) ballroom politics to provide a safe space to live in the joy of the moment, leaving behind the troubles of the outside world. And to serve as a vehicle for the manifestation of dreams deferred.
The Ovahness Ball soon became one of the two major West Coast annual stable functions, the other being the West Coast Awards Ball. With the production of high-end posters Ovahness sought to elevate the esteem of youth by coordinating professional photo shoots with ballroom participants (Stars, Statements, and Legends alike) and utilizing unique graphic design in the earliest days of Photoshop in the REACH LA computer arts lab. Icon Sean/Milan™ instituted the concept of multiple Grand March opening performances at each ball event to showcase musical and choreographic talents of young people within the scene. The Ovahness Ball became a training ground for young West Coast ballroom legends to host their own balls starting in 2016 with Legendary Gia Mizrahi’s Legends of the Future Ball and subsequent Ovahness Balls hosted by Legendary Father Jamari Blahnik and Legendary Enyce Ebony.
Multiple documentary films about the Ovahness Ball and the West Coast scene were created over the years to document ballroom stories and histories, that were produced with REACH LA in collaboration with Gina Lamb’s Media Arts for Social Justice students at Pitzer College. The Ovahness film projects resulted in the Ovahness Ball becoming the first ballroom event to partner with The OUTFEST/FUSION LGBTQ Film Festival and won the Audience Favorite award in 2007 for the documentary I’m Still Here Becoming Legendary, directed by Gina Lamb, Sean/Milan™ Garçon, and Armond Anderson Bell.
The Ovahness Archive documents 13 years of Ovahness Ball events from 2006-2018 and is an important collection of media documents (photos, posters, text & video) that extend the process of storytelling by-and-for the community and claim west coast ballroom history as our own. It provides a safe space to explore year by year, the themes, posters, categories, photos, and videos that still exist from the “Ovahness Era”. We hope you will have fun seeing younger selves bringing creativity, fashion, and moves to each specifically crafted category, and take time to memorialize those we have loved and lost along the way.
Special thanks go out to my co-founding pioneer cohorts of the West Coast Ballroom scene, including Ja Ja Mizrahi, Ebony Lane, Dion Bullard, and Jeffrey Bryant, for their commitment to building community. Special thanks to Icon Enyce Smith, who has been the invaluable official memory bank of names and categories during the 2-year process of platforming this archive. Also, thanks to REACH LA, staff, especially Tyrone Carter and Greg Wilson, Ovahness, co-producers, and executive directors, past and present, Martha Chono-Helsley and Miguel Bujanda. Many thanks go out to Steven Blank, Francisco Armenta, David Laffe, John Francis Peters, Rachel Hinman, Iggy, Laffrey Witbrod, and Gina Lamb for providing photo documentation. Thanks so much to the Pitzer media students who lent their web design and organization skills that supported the realization of the archive project, including Lucca Hebling, Luther Khoury, Karina Swerdloff, Lucy Falkner, Nikai Mackie, Eliot Williamson, and Perce Alvarez, and many others who over the years video documented & edited Ovahness event media.
- Icon Sean/Milan™Garçon & Gina Lamb
Tech Note: The Ovahness photos are platformed on Flickr to allow ballroom members to be able to download images they find of themselves in high resolution. If you create a free Flickr account, you can search for names within the Ball albums and add comments to individual photos. Also, we have tried to identify as many people, houses & categories as possible in the photos (house affiliations at the time the photos were taken), but if you find incorrect information, please let us know by using the contact form so we can update the photo info.
