Photo: Amanda Voisard
Dance can heal, we know that. It can be a cathartic soul-soother, as it's been, ironically, in Orlando after the recent June 12 Pulse Nightclub shooting claimed 49 lives and left the city, and the world, devastated and shaken and scared. It can heal people like Blue Star at the age of 4, when ballet classes fixed her "weird, turned-in legs," and once again now, at 42, as a professional dancer who finds comfort in her art – the same art that has brought light to the Orlando community when it needed it most.
"You look around," says the out dancer, recalling the days after her space, The Venue, reopened, "and everybody is just smiling and having a great time and they're loving the song and they're dancing and they're dancing."
In the hours and weeks after the tragic shooting, they kept moving only to stop to make noble contributions. Water, gift cards, paper towels, food. You name it. Blue, along with others in the community, organized the call for donations, putting together care packages for the victims, the victims' families and Pulse employees, whom she calls her "family."
"I always say that I'm the facilitator of fun," says Blue, affectionately known to the community as the "Mother of Burlesque," "and I became a facilitator in another way. I had these volunteers show up, and it was amazing to watch that happen – my staff just pulling together. To be able to walk into a place that we established four years ago – you never know what you're preparing for, but these last four years have really been preparation for what happened."
Since 2012, Blue has been the brainchild behind The Venue, a rental and performance establishment – a "safe space" for people to come together in artistic unity, or, yes, even to celebrate the impending birth of a newborn. Just a few miles from Pulse, on Virginia Drive, the space has hosted a variety of gatherings, from cabarets and burlesque shows to baby showers and bar mitzvahs.
But then the massacre happened, the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, and suddenly Blue knew the community needed this space, which she says she "built with love." Love abounded in the days following the incident, and The Venue was full of overflow from The Center, Orlando's preeminent LGBT community organization. "From sunrise to sunset," she remembers, "it was this ongoing energy field of hugs and donations and coping."
And healing. When Venue officially reopened the following Friday with a burlesque show, Blue recalls the vibe being "gentle."
"These four walls – that's our imagination land," she says, "and that's where we get to get away from things. Unfortunately, that was taken away from (the Pulse victims)."
After Pulse, Blue's movement-oriented hashtags – #ArtHeals, #BurlesqueHeals and #HealingOrlando – have helped mend the community's wounds.
"She's sort of grassroots, low-budget while simultaneously shining like a diamond in both dance and song," says Billy Manes, editor of Florida LGBT publication Watermark. "She'd just as soon play Donna Summer's 'On the Radio' and lose her mind in the living room as she would kick a leg up, collapse and cry within the span of second on stage in front of hundreds. Blue Star is the real deal.
"She has changed this town for the better. She's changed me for the better."
For Blue, her compassion for her fellow Orlando friends and "family" is a no-brainer. "You do what you're supposed to do," Blue says, simply, "and we are here to help one another and so I feel like it's kind of just the way it goes. This is what you need to do and you're gonna do it and then the next step comes and you're gonna do that too."
Even before Pulse, Blue was offering hope in the midst of tragedy through other altruistic endeavors. In 2014 she co-founded the Barber Fund, a grassroots organization established to assist men, women and children with cancer. The nonprofit is named in honor of Blue's friend, the late John "Tweeka" Barber, who died of sinonasal carcinoma in 2011. The Barber Fund's "One Love" slogan, inspired by a David Guetta and Estelle song of the same name, "has been so important since 2011." In recent months, following Pulse, "it's everywhere," she says.
"When her best friend John 'Tweeka' Barber died, she gave her all to start the One Love Foundation to fund others who are dealing with the terrors of cancer. When the Pulse massacre happened, she danced this city through its pain, showing up where necessary and never showboating," says Manes.
"Blue is a sort of pivotal bar of light in Orlando, an insurmountable force of nature in her compassion for others," he continues. "You wouldn't think a classically trained dancer with that smirk and wit would give a damn about anyone, but she gives all the damns."
