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Alegria flies! On the wings of angels,
Alegria flew to Los Angeles for its
inaugural West Coast event at LA's Club
Nokia - and angelboys from all over the
Left Coast lined up to receive their
Alegria wings.
For ten years, Alegria has dominated the
New York club scene with its marathon
events that are equal parts theatrical
production, dance music summits, and
family reunions, all fortified with a
serious dosage of incomparable male
beauty. It was in June 2000 that
producer Ric Sena brought Alegria to New
York for the first time - and over the
next decade, Alegria has become a
nocturnal juggernaut that has served as
a benchmark of excellence for circuit
events around the world.
It was, therefore, intriguing to imagine
this definitive New York party in the
middle of downtown Los Angeles at the
brand-new Club Nokia, which is part of
the massive LA Live complex right across
from the Staples Center. As futuristic
as it is vaguely dystopian with its Big
Brother corporate overtones, the
neighborhood evokes those fantasy
streets at Universal Studios or along
the Vegas Strip.
Inside Club Nokia, boys rode up and down
blue-lit elevators and chilled in cloud
blue lounges and romped along the
sky-level mezzanine overlooking the
packed dance floor. The atmosphere was
an amalgam of a cruise on Oasis of the
Seas, the largest cruise ship in the
world, and a circuit weekend at a host
hotel, where the boys are flying back
and forth between the dance floor and
their rooms.
For Alegria Angels & Dreams, Sena
produced a party that was notable for
the kind of theatre magic that had the
crowd gasping and cheering collectively
for spellbinding feats that defied
belief. The massive Alegria ball above
the floor sprouted golden wings - and
the evening's first production number
had a chorus line of pulchritudinous
angels as deliciously decadent as the
corps of male swans in Matthew Bourne's
"Swan Lake."
From atop a meringue of Alegria cloud,
Archangel Abel turned it out with a
booty-bumping performance that would
have left Beyonce gasping for breath -
and far behind in second place.
At Alegria, it has always been the music
that has fueled the magic - and the
magicians in the booth for Angels &
Dreams were DJs Ralphi Rosario and
Alyson Calagna (although one of our
favorite moments of the party came when
someone approached us, asking, "Is this
Alegria playing?" to which we could only
smile and reply, "Oh, yes, this is
Alegria playing.")
Rosario has a long history in Chicago,
home to the deepest house, while Calagna
gained a fanatical following for her
after-hours sets in Miami and at Arabian
Nights in Orlando during Gay Days. One
half of the dynamic duo Rosabel (along
with Alegria resident, DJ Abel
Aguilera), Rosario threw down a
churning, burning set that kickstarted
the house in motion with a kind of
feverish delirium.
Calagna has long been a morning mistress
whose rhythmically complex sets are as
addictive to the pelvis as they are
hypnotic to the head - and her gorgeous
signature Alegria track, with its
ethereal choir and mesmerizing melody,
was brilliantly utilized for the
evening's second production number.
As a producer, Sena has often utilized
his own theatrical background to insure
that Alegria events are the equivalent
of Las Vegas spectacles or Broadway
entertainment - and the illuminated boy
in the translucent bubble who rolls
across the stage and then back and forth
over the crowd has to be one of Sena's
more imaginative crowd-pleasers. The
reception from the packed floor was a
combination of stunned awe and ebullient
joy as a surfeit of giant blue balls
bobbed and bounced around the room.
And yet, as much credit must be paid to
the wizards behind the screens and in
the booth, what made Alegria Angels &
Dreams such a successful party was a
jubilant crowd. This was a house packed
with LA boys who came to turn it out -
and they danced like a host of angels
frolicking through a sky of pillow
clouds.
More than once, we ran into boys who
knew us as New Yorkers and who said,
"Welcome to LA." And this was exactly
the kind of warm welcome they extended
to Alegria.
After all, this was Los Angeles, city of
dreams - where the angels come out to
play.
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