Drag Race Belgique

Drag Race Belgique Season 2, Episode 3 – “Jawadde Dadde” Girl Groups Power Rankings

February 16, 2024 by krisis

Bon retour, mes chers lecteurs, dans plus de classements! Drag Race Belgique Season 2 Episode 3 was titled “Jawadde Dadde,” which had nothing to do with its Girl Groups challenge and Art Nouveau runway theme.

(The internet is cagey on the literal meaning of the Flemish expression “Jawadde Dadde,” a phrase uttered by guest judge Gaëlle Garcia Diaz. As far as I can tell, it’s an idiomatic phrase of that can mean anything from an exclamation of surprise (“oh my god” or “no way!”) to an expression of incredulity or exasperation (“oh my” or “really?”). It doesn’t have a direct translation in part because it is written phonetically the way it is spoken in certain regions – the actual words would be “ja wat dat.” If you translated it directly you’d get something like “Yes-what, that?!” If any of you readers can offer a better explanation, please comment!)

Jawadde Dadde was a study in contrasts, with a disastrous main challenge and a runway that reminded me of the reasons I loved Drag Race Belgique Season 1.

This episode’s Girl Groups performance posed the question: What if a Drag Race cast completely failed at one of the show’s standard challenges? I’m not sure if Girl Groups simply aren’t all that revered in Belgium or if we have an entire cast of non-singing non-dancers. Whatever the reason, it resulted in some truly questionable vocals and what surely ranks amongst the worst choreography in the history of Drag Race.

It’s a pity it turned out that way, because – as the queens pointed out – the instrumental track they were handed was a perfect rip-off of Robin S.’s “Show Me Love.”

The results could not have been more different on an Art Nouveau runway, which showed off the intellectualism and obsession with art that was so proudly on display in Season 1. Every queen presented something with at least one magnificent detail, which caused the judges to briefly feud over what ought to be considered Art Nouveau or allowed on an Art Nouveau runway. We saw one truly stunning runway hit the bottom purely for mixing up its period references.

(Yes, we’ve seen RuPaul go nuclear over 60s bouffant hair on a 70s outfit, but none of those 70s outfits were as opulent as this one!)

I love that Drag Race Belgique can assign an entire art movement as a runway theme with confidence that its cast will think deeply about how to symbolize it. I don’t think many of the other franchises could get away with that. Imagine if American Drag Race assigned ” Art Nouveau” as a theme! I’m sure we wouldn’t see the same results.

To me, this episode makes a good argument that if Drag Race continues to appear around the globe that some of its staple challenges ought to be better localized. Yes, we’ll always want to see Snatch Game and a Ball Challenge, but I wish we could see a full main challenge on Drag Race Belgique that leans into the show’s obsession with fashion and art history rather than it being constrained only to the runway.

An uneven episode led to uneven power rankings, with a new queen surging to the top and a surprising queen in contention for the finale compared to last week’s “Drag-en-Ciel” design challenge recap.

(Want to watch Drag Race Belgique outside of Belgium? For most of the world, it’s available 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!

Drag Race Belgique Season 2, Episode 2 – Drag-en-Ciel design challenge Power Rankings

February 9, 2024 by krisis

Bon retour, mes chers lecteurs, dans plus de classements! Drag Race Belgique Season 2 Episode 2 was titled “Drag-en-Ciel,” and it was a design challenge with a single color theme. Each queen was randomly assigned one color for her constructed outfit.

(“En ciel” mean “in the sky” and is a play on “arc-en-ciel,” which is the French phrase for “rainbow.”)

Vous êtes-vous déjà demandé ce qui se passerait si toutes les reines échouaient à un défi? C’est bon pour l’emission si les reines se font bien. Mais la série ne peut pas faire grand-chose aider quand tous le reines se débattent avec le même défi.

The cast of Drag Race Belgique Season 2 did not completely fail at this single-color design challenge, but they came dangerously close.

The challenge included a bevy of what seemed like conventional materials that wouldn’t be hard to work with. Yet, on the whole this cast doesn’t seem to have an eye for styling – nor do they have or the punk spirit of last season. Even the high placements could have been bottom material on a stronger design challenge.

That made this episode drag a bit, since none of the workroom gnashing-of-teeth resulted in any truly awesome runway moments. Since it was a design challenge and not a ball, there were no other more-polished runways to rely on.

Drag Race has a vested interest in putting on a show, and when everyone fails it needs to turn that into a spectacle like “Shakesqueer” or the Season 14 Snatch Game to keep things entertaining. But, there was no righteous rage from Rita Baga this episode – that’s not Belgique’s style. Even the bottom queens were treated gently, and ultimately the right queen went home.

Drag Race Belgique is at its best when leaning into intellectualism and its national identity, but this felt like it could have been an episode of any franchise. The combination of underwhelming designs and a muted response from the judges – plus a distinct lack of nerve amongst the contestants – made for a weak episode.

What does that mean for our Power Rankings? Some shake-ups from the Episode 1 “De Retour” talent show rankings as a quiet queen makes her move, a confident queen stumbled, and a safe queen seems to be doing pretty darn well.

(Want to watch Drag Race Belgique outside of Belgium? For most of the world, it’s available 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!

Drag Race Belgique Season 2, Episode 1 – De Retour Talent Show & Drache Nationale runway Power Rankings

February 2, 2024 by krisis

Bon retour, mes chers lecteurs! It’s the return of Drag Race Belgique! Drag Race Belgique Season 2 Episode 1 was titled “De Retour,” and it was a standard first episode of an international Drag Race: a talent show and a “Drache Nationale” runway that showed off a national theme.

(“Drache National” is the Belgian phrase in French for a heavy rainstorm on Belgian National Day, 21 July.)

J’aimerais pouvoir vous parler de cette émission dans un beau français, mais cela prendrait dix fois plus de temps! Alors, vous obtenez mon anglais. Mais, je vous invite à commenter en français et je comprendrai (la plus grande partie).

That goes for those of you who comment in English as well! If you want to see me continue to cover Drag Race Belgique (and other franchises), your views, shares, and comments really matter. The reason I started covering more international franchises in 2023 is because my coverage of Drag Race France Season 1 in 2022 was massively popular – as much as some of my biggest comic guides!

This premiere episode kicks off an intense week of international Drag Race, with three franchises debuting in just 8 days – Belgique, Drag Race España All Stars, & RuPaul’s Drag Race UK vs. The World. When I first saw that schedule I thought, “perhaps I’ll just do a brief post on each.” Yet, as I watched this episode – and especially as the queens of Drag Race Belgique Season 1 returned to walk the runway – I remembered just how much I adored this franchise when I wrote about it last year.

Bien sûr, j’aime toujours une saison qui est en français! Mais il y a autre chose que j’aime dans Drag Race Belgique. L’année dernière, j’ai vu que… there is some tension inherent in Belgian drag. On one side, there are very traditional, established cabaret artists. On the other, there are punks who are playing by their own rules – including all of last year’s top three – Susan, Athena Sorgelikis and winner Drag Couenne.

Yet, no matter what “side” they were on, the queens were incredibly smart. Belgique Season 1 gave us some of the most clever art references we’ve had on any Drag Race runway with their bandes dessinées and “Ce n’est pas une pipe” runways.

Not only that, but the judges have a very keen eye for fashion. They don’t only want over-the-top looks, but looks that speak to certain styles and references from distinct regions of the country or specific aspects of its history.

Pour moi, la Belgique est peut-être la meilleure de toutes les franchises pour raconter l’histoire du drag d’un pays (alongside Drag Race Phillipines!). Despite the widespread skepticism about Rita being a Canadian hosting a Belgian show, I feel like she respects the culture of Belgian drag and is not trying to make it into something exclusively Canadian or entirely international. Just the fact that a weirdo alikeDrag Couenne won the first season of the show speaks volumes – usually first season winners tend to represent something quintessential about the country’s drag.

Because of all of that, I couldn’t bring myself to not write about this season – at least, for the premiere! I think we once again have a cast full of incredibly smart queens who fall to either side of that old-school cabaret / new-school punk divide. And, they seem particularly strong – without the drag neophytes we saw as early outs last year.

(Want to watch Drag Race Belgique outside of Belgium? For most of the world, it’s available 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!

Drag Race Belgique Season 1, Episode 8 – Grand Finale “Eleganza Extravanganza” runway Review and Power Rankings

April 9, 2023 by krisis

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the eighth and final episode of Drag Race Belgique Season 1! The Drag Race Belgique Grand Finale and its “Eleganza Extravaganza” theme that brought bought all ten queens of the season for a final walk down the runway!

SPOILERS AHEAD for the winner of Drag Race Belgique! Consider yourself warned!

This final episode stuck to the familiar Drag Race finale format. The queens had to pen a verse to a song, though it was an original called “Fierce” rather than an anonymous RuPaul remix. They all had out-of-drag sit-downs with Rita Baga, who was charming-as-always in her out of drag appearances.

And the queens had to deliver an elegant final runway and make some commentary to their younger selves (a cringe-inducing import from the US show that I hoped Rita would jettison as Canada’s Drag Race has done).

The format turned out to be a terrific showcase for the final three, even if it also confirmed that two of them had already already fully ceded their chances of winning to the third.

Susan was crisp and powerful in her choreography, showing off a muscular quality to her drag we hadn’t had the chance to see since the Talent Show. Athena regained a steely, fierce quality that had been eroded over the course of the season, delivering the most-convincing fierce drag performance of the trio.

Yet, there was no denying that this episode, and this entire season, belonged to Drag Couenne. We have rarely seen a queen represent herself and her runway package so meticulously and with such confidence across all of the many Drag Race franchises. I place Couenne’s powerful full-season performance alongside the greats like Bob The Drag Queen, Envy Peru, and Carmen Farala.

I think it is incredibly exciting that Rita Baga and the rest of the judging panel rewarded Drag Couenne’s singular take on drag with a Drag Race crown. I feel like on many franchises that a queen as weird as Couenne would be patronized and cut just short of the finale. That the judges gave Couenne the space to show of the fullness of her powers speaks to their taste in consistency in judging this entire season.

I loved Drag Race Belgique Season 1 from beginning to end. Even if I thought Rita Baga’s drag fashions were often forgettable and Lufy’s judging was often wrong-headed, this was a tremendously talented cast who were all treated fairly by the show.

This week’s final placements shook out exactly as I ranked them last week after the “Discour de Reine” challenge. What’s left to power rank? I’m not going to be ranking the queen’s final “Eleganza Extravaganza” runways, which were universally lovely. Instead, this final ranking is a retrospective of each queen’s placement, and how that compares to my pre-season predictions.

(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!

Drag Race Belgique Season 1, Episode 7 – “Discour de Reine” public speaking challenge Review and Power Ranking

April 2, 2023 by krisis

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the seventh episode of Drag Race Belgique Season 1 – Discour de Reine, or “Queen’s Speech.” Each of the Top 4 had to deliver their own coronation speech as Belgium’s queen for a day, and then walk the runway wearing “Glamour à Knokke-le-Zoute.“

A “public speaking but make it funny” challenge is one of those late-season episodes where the judging can be very subjective.

Here I felt that the opposite happened – the judging seemed the most level-headed it had been all season.

Part of that is that the queens easily self-selected into the perfect four roles for a semi-final episode: the overconfident queen who goes over time, the brainy queen finally hitting her mark, the queen who plays it to safe one too many times, and the anxious queen struggling to make herself heard.

The judges had to go by the stratification of the challenge itself, because the runway wasn’t much help. Everyone looked good, but the bigger problem was the judges themselves couldn’t seem to agree on what the theme meant! Glamour à Knokke-le-Zoute is a seaside resort town, and the judges seemed to be split on if they were looking for the actual glamour of the region (which they felt was something more chic than eleganza) or just something glamourous that suggested the region with a nautical theme.

It seemed like that made the queens somewhat immune to hearing the tough runway critiques they’ve encountered earlier in the season, with Susan especially benefiting from the indecision. Ultimately that yielded an unsurprising lip sync, a fair result, and a Top 3 I’ve been rooting for since the pre-season. That means there is zero shake-up from last week’s makeover rankings as we head into the finale next week.

(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!