CAYA is back!

In the organizer's words:

Come As You Are - CAYA for short! In this ball format by Shapes&Shades, there are no strict guidelines regarding looks and aesthetics, as long as you serve it on the floor!

The Ballroom Community or Ballroom Scene describes a cultural place and a community that has its roots in New York's Black and Latinx LGBTQI+ community. The first balls already existed in Harlem in the 1920s within the LGBTQI+ scene, whereby balls were a place of queer expression, but not free of racist dynamics. The Ballroom community emerged from this space through the queer Black and LatinX community in New York. Ballroom is chosen family, support system and a place of competition, where queer people of color protect and network at the same time, express themselves creatively and compete against each other in various artistic disciplines such as performance, realness or runway.

CAYA is a format conceived by Shapes & Shades and inspired by the New York Vogue Knights: an iconic underground event of the 2000s where the community came together weekly to celebrate, battle and express themselves artistically. The event looks back on a long tradition in New York and became particularly important when big balls increasingly took on the character of elaborate large-scale events through extravagant costumes.

CAYA holds the space for exactly this: to preserve the community and club culture spirit of ballroom culture.
COME AS YOU ARE - the best, sexiest, most fabulous version of yourself.