In 2011, Lorena Valenzuela packed her bags and flew from her home of Mexico to Los Angeles to compete in a dance battle. The day before the contest, she attended a class at Evolution Studios in North Hollywood focused on "punking" — a series of sharp, fast movements rooted in exaggerated looks and expressive body language that emerged in queer underground Hollywood clubs during the 1970s. A fellow dancer had introduced Valenzuela to the unique style when the two were a part of the Funkdation dance crew. "It really caught my attention — all the lines, all the poses, all the expressions and the energy, the character," Valenzuela says.
The class's instructor Viktor Manoel — who was also a judge at the dance competition that year — spotted Valenzuela and asked her to freestyle that day. At the time, she only knew four moves. But that wasn't enough for Manoel. "He stopped the music mid-freestyle and goes, 'Really? Is this all you got? Is this why you came all the way from Mexico?'" Valenzuela recalls him saying. "Do it again, for real."
"I just started throwing myself to the ground, all my clothes were ripped, and I was just going insane," she says. "This is the moment where I understood what this dance really was." Valenzuela realized that the movements weren't meant to look pretty; they expressed the toughest emotions.
