Throwing a ball: Witnessing the queer afterlife of Cats

In June 2024, Cats: The Jellicle Ball premiered at the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) in downtown New York to wildly positive critical and audience reception. Billed as a ‘radical reimagining’, the production re-presented musical Cats within the immersive world of a queer Ball. As theatre and dance scholars embedded in rehearsals, we witnessed how the intergenerational creative team and performers reanimated Cats through a queer lens. With iconic elders from the worlds of theatre (André De Shields) and Ballroom (Junior LaBeija, ‘Tempress’ Chasity Moore), The Jellicle Ball activated the ethics of a queer communal web through a divine restorative practice that queered the Christian rites of passage that structure Cats . In this article, we discuss the crafting of a Ballroom community ethos within the constraints of capitalism. We trace efforts to queer time, space and direction in rehearsals and performance. We consider the relationship of rights to rites, asking how this community of mostly queer/trans, Black and Brown cats came together through the musical’s passages. We assess how choreography works within the rhythmic structures of the original score while making room for responsive performances ‘on the beat’. We sketch how the communal journey of the performance-making process maps onto the trajectories of Ballroom – the movement into chosen family and ‘legacy’ as well as the walk down the runway. We ask: How does this joyful manifestation of queer caretaking and intergenerational community play out? What does it mean to ‘adapt’ an AIDS-era megamusical into a contemporary moment – where the Otherness of ‘cats’ gets reimagined into Ballroom cat-egories? What does it mean to throw this particular Ball – to create the occasion for folks to gather around memory, ritual, legacy and community? What do we pass on?