It’s February, and February means Auckland Pride Festival, which means a kaleidoscope of events, exhibitions, workshops, and gatherings taking place across the city all month that celebrate and centre the queer community. Underneath the umbrella of Auckland Pride Festival sits PROWL Festival which features free waacking workshops, a community jam, a tiered-ticket battle night, a season of PROWL dance performances, as well as after-parties. The goal is to offer high-quality dance experiences to the queer community, regardless of cost, background, or dance level.
Waacking is a queer street dance style that was invented in queer clubs in 1970s Los Angeles, practiced primarily by Black and Latino men, that has now found its way into street and queer dance communities around the world, including Aotearoa. The focus is on the arms, which dancers move in circular, rapid, and rhythmic movements – almost whipping, or wacking, them around as dramatic poses strike the beat. It takes inspiration not from disco music and from the Golden Age of Hollywood (1915–1963-ish). As with many artforms to come out of the queer community, the roots are deep and varied. As PROWL Productions artistic director Hayley Walters puts it, “Waacking is a style that is full of drama, full of life, full of fun, but the core of it is self-expression.”
Walters was introduced to waacking through a high school dance competition called Bring It On (throwback!), and she then joined New Zealand’s first waacking crew, The Jaackers, created by Jaydess Nand in 2015. Walters later led the crew. “We would battle, we would hold jams, we would dance, we would represent during other people’s battles,” she recalls. She left the group and created PROWL in 2022, as a sort of bridge between the street dance community and the wider arts community.
Renee Wikitoria, now the co-producer of PROWL Fest, first met Walters at Auckland Uni, but it was when she started putting on work with her collective Freedom Movers, for “outcasts and outliers” in the dance community, at Basement Theatre that she and Walters properly connected. Since then, Wikitoria has served as a sort of event manager as PROWL has expanded the work it does and the community it serves.“Our community has gotten bigger and bigger over the years,” says Wikitoria. We just need to find you, and you need to find us.”
As PROWL held workshops, Walters sensed a growing consensus that there needed to be more spaces for beginners to show up and try something new. PROWL Fest came together as the right things lined up. Walters knew that she wanted to bring PROWL, a street dance theatre which premiered at Basement Theatre in 2024, back for Pride. “I thought the show was such a great fit,” she says. “We’ve done free workshops during Pride, just to activate community and because there’s not a lot of waacking representation in the past. We thought it was a great way to encourage new dancers or someone who doesn’t feel like they want to be a typical studio dancer, but just wants to dance in the club or have some moves up their sleeve.”
The idea then came to combine the show and the workshops, which also lined up with a residency Walters had at Glen Innes’ Te Oro space. “All of these things started accumulating,” says Walters, and eventually PROWL “felt like something to give its own lane to.” The alignment with Auckland Pride, arguably the country’s largest arts and community festival, made sense. “It’s to give back waacking and bring it into this place of queer community. There’s street dance and waacking, and then there’s the queer community where waacking will thrive, and it has to be centred there to thrive.”
The festival also, crucially, brings Prowl out of the CBD – specifically, perhaps cynically, the square encompassed by Ponsonby Road, K’Rd, Queen St, and the Waitemata – and into the suburbs. “We’ve built quite a strong base there, having our season at Basement, activations at Raynham Park (on K’ Rd), and teaching around the CBD,” Walters says. “There’s the idea to maybe just keep developing here, but I think Prowl is much bigger than me, and our people come from everywhere around Auckland, not just the CBD.”
This has, not coincidentally, been a focus of Auckland Pride through their Proud Centres programme, which in 2026 is hosting 130 free events throughout Tāmaki Makaurau, most of which are well outside the bounds of the CBD. “This is a taster of us coming out of Auckland Central and seeing how people take us outside of where Pride might typically be centred,” says Walters “I think it will encourage other collectives to go out into the suburbs and activate those spaces.”
It’s a festival that is “mini” only in the sense that it is smaller than the festival it sits under which, again, is one of the biggest festivals in the country. It’s still a huge amount of mahi to be doing within the month, when usually these types of events might be spread across an annual calendar. “The biggest thing is that the gas pedal is just down,” says Walters. “We’ve done all of these individually – we’ve had a season of Prowl, we’ve had free workshops, we’ve had an open rehearsal last year – but doing all these things week after week has been interesting, but if we don’t try, we’ll never know.”
“We won’t come out of this unscathed, but we’ll come out of it smarter.”
The silver lining to the hard work is the excitement – and the energy that comes from it. “I’m excited for other street dancers to see this, to see what we’re doing and to take up space in the different avenues we’re trying to move in. I’m excited for the possibility that can come after this,” says Walters.
“I’m excited to upskill as well – to see how we can best serve community and what we can offer,” Walters says. “And knowing our limits, how we can spread this knowledge into doing this for other communities. Our community of artists are doing events and shows in their own right, so we’re gonna come through, learn all of this, survive, and bring it back to everyone else that we wanna champion.”
Right now, though, Walters’ dream is to see people she’s never seen before – or people who have existed at the edges of their events once or twice – waacking. “I would be like, ‘My job is done.'”
