Whitney Biennial 2017

Floor 3

Born 1979 in Los Angeles, CA
Lives in Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY

Leilah Weinraub’s film SHAKEDOWN (2017) is an intoxicating, dreamlike portrait of Los Angeles’s African-American lesbian strip club scene, in which a network of female performers attached to a weekly party called Shakedown take center stage. As the women reflect on their lives and work, a promised land comes into view built around sexual display and the desiring gaze of queer women of color, a utopian community organized and sustained by a Black, female microeconomy where money and explicit performances are exchanged in a spirit of ecstatic self-determination. When after several years this utopia erodes, the Shakedown dancers are forced to adapt and confront the reality of commodified labor and hourly wages. The subculture Weinraub documents in SHAKEDOWN is propelled by female creators infamous in their own community but whose cultural contributions are alternately pirated or ignored by society at large.

Blending together rich visual lyricism with an assemblage of interviews, original recordings of performances, archival footage, and indie ads, SHAKEDOWN chronicles the personal and professional relationships of the party’s dancers and organizers, among them: Ronnie-Ron, Shakedown Productions’s creator and emcee; Mahogany, the legendary mother of the scene; Egypt, Shakedown’s star dancer; and Jazmine, the Queen of Shakedown. Mapping out economies of pleasure rarely seen onscreen, Weinraub herself emerges as a desiring participant, rejecting the pose of “neutral onlooker” in favor the intimate gaze of a collaborator and confidante.

As a filmmaker, Weinraub has sought to document a new phase in the avant-garde, one led by autonomous communities of color, whose creative output has often been extracted and monetized by mass culture but whose stories have rarely been told on their own terms.

Screenings: May 20–21