“I’m the beauty, and you’re the beast,” Ms. Boogie proclaims on stage in front of an entranced audience — but she’s not talking to us. She’s talking to the trade. Under a spotlight at The Shed, one of New York City’s most paramount arts institutions, Rose Rayos, a.k.a. Ms. Boogie, takes center stage. In a one-night-only performance, the Dominican-Colombian diva delivers cyphers, soliloquies and sonnets in The Odyssey, a theatrical reimagining of her debut studio album The Breakdown.

Born in the Dominican Republic, raised in East New York and brought up in the ballroom scene, certain ideals were instilled in Ms. Boogie from perseverance to presentation to pride. Every voyage, every endeavor and every side quest has led to the woman she is today. Now this “Black Butterfly” is ready to share what she’s learned with the world in a premier dramaturgical installation in the heart of Manhattan.

“I felt a great sense of becoming, self-discovery and possibility,” Ms. Boogie tells PAPER as she drives through the streets of Brooklyn. “I’d been in a few different art performances and stage plays, but I had never spearheaded my own. I was never a part of one that revolved around hip-hop.”

Hip-hop artists traditionally plan a series of music video rollouts after dropping an album, but Ms. Boogie is not one for conventions. Instead of following the status quo, this rising rap star opted for an interstellar installation at The Shed. From her 2020 club quarantine banger “Fem Queen” calling out men on the down low while remixing Fivio Foreign’s “Big Drip” beat to the wet, white-hot writing on her sultry single “Dickspline,” she proves that she’s not playing by anyone’s rules. This game is all her own.

“If I could interpret all of my music in this way, I absolutely would,” she says. “I prefer it over a stationary music video or a show at the club. People don’t honor hip hop or rap in these mediums.”

Ms. Boogie goes on to quote her friend, Shirt, a Queens-based conceptual artist and rapper, who asks the question, “Can a rap song have the significance of art?” in a printed work on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Ms. Boogie responds with a defiant, “yes.”

In The Odyssey, an exclusive avant-garde performance akin to the pioneering works of FKA twigs and Miles Greenberg, Ms. Boogie deconstructs and expands upon the prose of her album. Through a mixing of mediums, including spoken word, movement, and traditional rap performance, she illustrates the lived realities of a Black trans woman striving to thrive in a world obdurate in striking her down. The journey to producing this show began in December of last year and was met with a few roadblocks. “Unfortunately, it’s very hard to present proof of concept in institutional spaces when you want to bring rap music to life,” she says. “There’s more chances of them leaning toward classical, jazz or other genres. Whether that’s because rap is so Black or because rap is honest, I’m not sure.” No matter the obstacles, Ms. Boogie was never afraid to showcase her vision and go up to bat for it. “It wasn’t daunting, but was it challenging to go up against an institution asking for the resources you deserve or need? Absolutely. That’s also just the experience of a lot of artists. Especially Black artists and certainly Black trans artists.”

At the beginning of the performance, she slinks through the darkness of the black box theatre like a cyborg waking up for the first time. Her augmented voice echoes through the space, giving the audience a taste of what’s to come: “To understand the different variations of human outside of your own experience is to realize that you are not alone” followed by “To break down the walls we have built to protect ourselves is a never-ending voyage.” Her body slinks across the theater’s terrain, circling around three glowing chandeliers on the ground. Ms. Boogie then stands tall, taking center stage and addressing the audience with a newfound fortitude and focus. From there, the beat drops and the showgirl comes out to play.

“I always fantasized about bringing my work to life in this way, but it felt like the opportunity had expired, the project didn’t have the same momentum or I had simply just moved on,” she says. Ms. Boogie began her music career before formally asserting her trans experience to the world. For many trans people in the public eye, this can sometimes lead to being ostracized from spaces they once occupied. For Ms. Boogie, she looks at every juncture of her life as another piece of the journey. “The idea of the window closing is a figment of our imaginations that we create to protect ourselves,” she says. “You created the project which means you also created that window. It never closes unless you want it to. Trust and behold that any opportunity will circle back to you.”

Ms. Boogie took this opportunity to give girls like her a seat at the table. From the soul stylings of South Carolina native Demi Vee to the rambunctious, buoyant and bountiful braggadocio of rapper Ky Ani, fem queens ruled the stage. “I didn’t even realize it until Ky Ani posted on Instagram, ‘Two shows, one night, for fem queens!’ Then I was like, wait a minute, we’re all over this show!” Even behind the scenes Black trans femmes were working behind the scenes like Mo Jamieson, aka Boo Boo, the sound engineer of the production and producer behind The Breakdown. “The feeling of possibility was strong that night. We felt very capable,” she says.

As a classically trained R&B singer, Demi Vee was more than ready to lend her voice to The Odyssey. She began singing in Presbyterian churches in both Florida and North Carolina before moving onto musical theatre school. When Ms. Boogie asked her to join the cast, Demi jumped at the chance: “My mission was to make sure that I made my sister proud. I hope that other people walked away feeling inspired because the entire show was ovah!” Like the three chandeliers sprouting up from the ground (which were all original sculpture pieces by Ms. Boogie), Demi sprang into action. As she walked onstage, the lights went red, highlighting the iridescence of her all-white, body-hugging gown. Her voice floated through the atmosphere of the theatre like a soloist in an empty cathedral as she sang her own original songs “Call My Name” and “Moody.”

“Rose put a fire in the girls that night, performing a whole art piece on a rap album she made about dating and sex work as a Black trans woman,” Vee says. “Her words, her lyrics, her delivery… there’s always something to take away from it. It’s hard to believe it’s her debut project. It gave last dance. My sister said, ‘Imma give it all I got!’ And when I got on that stage, I did the same.”

Ms. Boogie grew up in a pre-transgender tipping point New York City ballroom scene that instilled old school ways of survival. The methodologies she was raised on inspired her performance and her album as a whole. “The idea of transitioning was about breaking down what you once were and then building yourself back up into what you want to be,” she says. “I don’t hear this same verbiage anymore, but in those days, it was about breaking down your muscles and your bones anything having to do with masculinity, to then resurface into your femininity.” While those ideals do not align with Ms. Boogie’s values or even the majority of the trans community today, she recognizes how those extreme notions of conformity and perfected passability still permeate cisgender people’s perceptions. “The Breakdown is the opposite of perfection,” she says. “I wanted to challenge people to think about transitions beyond the physical. I want them to think about what it’s like to transition socially, romantically and even financially.”

A key intention behind The Odyssey was bridging the gap between trans people and cis people. Through scenes onstage, Ms. Boogie channels her inner thespian with moments at the beauty shop, discussions with secretive men and monologues about the struggles of being a Black woman. Many of these moments could have been performed by a cis woman, but as a whole, they make up the trans experience. “As much as we have in common, there’s always that added layer of transness,” she says. In a culture war-torn country full of far-right commentators spewing anti-trans sentiment on the news and across social media platforms, cis people are more aware of trans people now than ever before. However, their education seldom ever comes from the horse’s mouth. “Everybody’s talking about, ‘Well, I can do this and you can do that’ or ‘Your existence impacts my existence in this way.’ I rarely hear the ways in which cis women and trans women are affected by men collectively,” she says. “I don’t see dialogue between a cis female sex worker and a trans female sex worker. We both selling something. It might be on different aisles, but we’re in the same department store.” Ms. Boogie aims to heal tension between both communities by creating a space for all to commune rather than compete.

During the second act, Ms. Boogie knocks a man into his seat. He wears a demon mask that she sculpted in the Dominican Republic three years ago that conceals his face but reveals his true monstrous nature. “I’m the beauty and you’re the beast,” she says, reminding him of his place and defying what many women, trans or cis, are told to believe. Across the audience, there’s audible gasps and mournful tears shed. Ms. Boogie is building herself and everyone up along with her: “I’m the prize.”

Photography: Hip Torres, Tori Mumtaz