IN THIS HOUSE

Bria Miller, a visual artist, will provide the visual direction for this show in the promotional materials, and projections during the live show, as well as intertwined into the final video edit of the recording.

Live performances include:
Live arrangements and performance of Superfluid Collective with their vocal collaborators. Live hybrid performance (DJ + live bass + vocals + vocal looping + synthesizer + piano) by TUSH
Closing DJ set by DJ Douvet.

The purpose of this project is to expand the understandings of dance music by grounding the genres in a historical context of Black, racialized, and queer expression presenting a (non-exclusive and non-linear) mapping of dance music from past to present, connecting current dance music releases to their predecessors in soul, funk, disco, jazz music presenting current artists in Nova Scotia creating dance music, soul, and jazz music.

In addition, this project will be exploring the limitlessness of soul and dance music via its hybridity (i.e. the mixing of analog and digital/electronic instruments) and via its viscerality. These genres of music are driven by embodied experience of Blackness and queerness rather than criteria of instrumentation.

We are pitching this show at an interesting time as Halifax is undergoing a renaissance of house music led by Black artists, which is a rarity in this genre which has become white-washed over the decades. In the mainstream, we've also seen a recent (attempted) pivot to house music being adopted by Beyoncé and Drake, not to mention the ways that vogue and ballroom culture, in the family tree of Black music, has been adopted (and appropriated) by mainstream pop culture in recent years.