Deena Abdelwahed

I want to keep making music that people can dance to, without forgetting the socio-cultural context and the inequalities between those who feel excluded from the clubbing scene, and the dominant elite. Of course, as an artist from an Arab country, I’m interested in reclaiming Arab music and adapting it to the current music scene without bending to western musical norms. The African American community took those norms and reshaped them to create their own music and modernity. I want to figure out how and why African American music become so popular the world over; how we can learn from and recreate that success while building on the specificities of each culture; and how this knowledge can help those on the margins carve out a space for themselves in places where the music scene is monopolized by elites.

I’ve always loved the synergy between dance and electronic music in the US: breakdancing to hip-hop, jazz dancing to house, voguing to ballroom, footworking to juke… For electronic music to be democratic and accessible to all, I’m convinced it has to be combined with dance and movement. With this research residency, I want to understand the various musical, technical, and artistic factors that make up the clubbing scene.

My residency will start in Atlanta, the birthplace of the African American civil rights movement, but also of a type of street music that burst onto the scene in the late 1990s and beginning of the 21st century, and which is now broadcast across the globe: Atlanta Bass, Crunk, Dirty South, and the creations of socially conscious rap artists like OutKast.

Next, it’s off to New York, whose clubs and warehouses first brought together the best DJs and LGBT communities from all walks of life to dance, and which is now a hot spot for experimental electronic music and digital art.

The last stage of the residency will take place in Chicago, where juke and footwork grew out of house to take the street dance world by storm. Those two styles made me really fall in love with electro dance music. They were created by supposedly poor, uneducated communities, and yet their sophisticated, avant-garde artistry has had a huge impact on today’s experimental electronic dance music.