Hear her Ra
Bhenji Ra is poised on the tips of her Giuseppe Zanottis, effortlessly easing out of a duck walk, when we first meet on the set of her Vogue photo shoot. For the uninitiated, the duck walk is a universal dance move in the voguing lingua franca , a style of dance born out of 1960s Harlem. The move looks the way it sounds, only with a dancer’s rhythm – body bent in a squat, weight balanced on one’s heels, feet alternating forwards and backwards in the manner of the humble bird. When executed to the beat, the duck walk, as Ra demonstrates, can lift the mood in a photo studio, but it can also conjure up a history that predates the movement, that of Harlem’s underground voguing balls in 1980s New York.
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