Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the third episode of Drag Race Belgique Season 1 – “Festival Realness,” a combination ball and design challenge with just a pair of looks and a loosely-defined brief (and one of my all-time favorite songs as a lip sync).
It’s always fascinating to see the first design challenge of a season and that’s doubly true for the first design challenge for an entire franchise. Will the constructed looks trend haute couture or plaintive and practical?
I think the Festival Realness results fell somewhere in the middle of that range, partly because the brief was so vague. How exactly do you combine the pragmatism of a festival look with runway-ready fashion? I think the solution is likely something fantastical like you’d spot at Burning Man, but all of these looks are fairly conventional in form and function save for one (and it’s no coincidence it was the winner).
If the Festival Realness looks weren’t surprising, the outcome of the episode certainly was! From shocking top placements to an indecisive three-way lip sync, everything about the judging this episode was a little puzzling. What did that mean for my Power Ranking compared to last week’s comedy challenge? Honestly, it involved lot of guesswork on which way the judges would lean in the future after tonight’s unpredictable results.
I recently went on a diatribe in my write up of the US franchise’s lip sync Lalaparuza about how I find lip syncs to be a dull form of entertainment that I eschew both as a drag fan and as a potential drag performer. However, if there is ONE SONG that I have lip synced to more than ANY OTHER SONG in my life, it is Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam.” I’ve previously told the story of how I carried my boombox out to the curb of my grandparent’s house to choreograph my own performance in the middle of their tiny side street every evening after seeing the group open for Madonna on her Blonde Ambition tour.
I think my nightly pre-teen dance routine probably could’ve beaten two of the queens in this lip sync, if not all three. “Pump Up the Jam” is all about its non-stop thumping beat and rocking your body the entire time. None of these three queens lived up to that for me.
(Want to watch Drag Race Belgique outside of Belgium? For most of the world, it’s available as part with a Wow Presents Plus subscription as soon as the episode is done airing.)
Lecteurs, start your engines. Et, que la meilleure Drag Queen gagne!