The dance form "voguing" was born in New York in the 1980s. Its title came from Vogue magazine, and it was based around a mimetic pantomime of a model adjusting her clothes and putting on make-up. It divided into butch-queen and femme-queen versions, and more recently into old and new styles, but Willi Ninja, who has died of heart-related Aids aged 45, was the master of them all. Ninja would emerge with his hips twitching to the basic beat, but in rhythmic counterpoint to his upper body writhing, while his arm contorted in graceful undulations, taking the fluidity of the hand movements of Fayard Nicholas (obituary, January 27) to a new level.
Later in the 80s Malcolm McLaren heard about Ninja and voguing. Astounded by Ninja's "warrior nobility", and unique take on the louche swagger of the fashion runway walk, he took a Ninja-led ensemble of dancers around the European fashion houses, where they made a huge impact. For McLaren. Ninja did not just wear clothes, he acted them - with a passion that was rare in the fashion industry. Designers Chanel, Carl Lagerfeld, Jean Paul Gaultier, Thierry Mugler and others used Ninja as a model and trainer, and he coached the likes of Naomi Cambell and Iman on how to walk the walk.
In 1990 Madonna, astounded by the energy and impact of the vogue dancers at a McLaren event in Los Angeles, co-wrote her song Vogue and recruited Jose and Luis Xtravaganza from the family that was the House of Ninja. They injected the real dancing into Madonna's performances and her record label upgraded the song from a B-side. It became a worldwide hit. The house-rave scene was already underway in Britain and across Europe, but it was enormously boosted by these developments.
Ninja never let his extraordinary talent divert him from playing a positive role, whether dealing with gay scene rivals, homophobic hip-hop dancers, or pop stars who wanted to use him. Modest, riveting when dancing, he displayed a proper concern for young people who joined the House of Ninja.
Born William Leake in Long Island, New York, he had an undistinguished school career in Flushing Queens, but his talent soon led him to Manhattan. Arriving in Greenwich Village in the late 1970s, he joined the young gay scene that met, flaunted themselves and danced early forms of voguing on the Christopher Street pier and Washington Square.
Voguing had echoes of the defiant 19th-century African-American Sunday parading and the not-so-pretended putdown glares of female partners passing each other in Afro-Caribbean styles of the quadrille. The evolution of the spectacular faggots' balls - as everyone called them - at the Rockland Palace and Savoy Ballroom in Harlem in the 1920s provided a location where those older dance expressions could infuse the glamorous aspirations of the largely cross-dressing participants.
The 1980s voguing scene injected more dance by returning to the fluid styles of lindy hopping from the 1930s era of swing, rather than the alternative "stepping styles" that hip-hop had utilised so extensively. Thus as the initial hip-hop scene declined in the 1980s, its characteristic "challenge circle" was replaced by the gay scene's runway style of confrontation.
Although appreciative of McLaren's "foxy talents", as Ninja once put it to me, it was Jenni Livingstone's award-winning film of New York's drag ball-voguing scene, Paris Is Burning (1990), that put Ninja in a more congenial position in the gay fashion scene. It captured the 1987-89 voguing scene, expressing its defiant acceptance of everyone rejected by those attempting to morally homogenise the US. The excitement of that drag-voguing scene receded in the 1990s but interest in Ninja and his milieu persisted. Fashion work became a staple, although he was increasingly disenchanted with the exploitation of fashion no-hopers charged extortionate fees to "prepare" for modelling.
It took modern dancers as courageous as Doug Elkin and Karol Armitage to include him in their productions, for Ninja was a hard act to follow. There were television appearances too, and Sally Sommer recorded Ninja and other house dancers for her epic work, Check Your Body at the Door, that should be completed soon. Ninja made one of his last appearances on Barbara Orton's BBC production Bruce Goes Dancing last year, in which he commented on the "cart horse" attempts of pop stars at runway walking on pop videos.
He did not always abide by the cautions he gave to his own house family, young gay men and voguers about the dangers of "living for the fast life". But he bravely faced his end with the equanimity that characterised his life.
· Willi Ninja (William Roscoe Leake), dancer, born April 12 1961; died September 2 2006