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Introduction to TRPC & Househedz
Founded in January of 2001, ThickRoutes Performance Collage is a collaborative of women drawing from a variety of creative mediums, heritages, and perceptions. Our dialogues consistently work towards negotiation, compromise, mutual understanding and respect for the right to difference. We strive to use our multivalent skills to conceive, explore, and develop performances that evoke thought and inspire thick conversation. TRPC creates original movement-theatre works merging dance; spoken word/vocal exploration; original sound-scapes based on environmental sounds and ethnographic-based conversations/interviews; and video.
Our work shifts between personal narrative-stories and larger macro-societal forces, creating collage-like meditations that focus on the dialogue/dialectic between individual agency, collective space and the larger cultural, social, political and economic issues that frame our daily lives. Past works have dealt with issues of women creating safe “home” spaces (Home Stories, 2001); understanding the African diaspora’s significance to local African American women (Bag Ladies, 2002); and intercultural negotiations of race and nation/citizenship issues between the disparate cultures/nations of Trinidad/Caribbean and Chicago/America (Race Travels, 2004).
In 2006, TRPC began to develop Househedz. A cultural context deeply familiar to most of us, we wanted to approach house’s impact on our lives – how it affects the way we move and, in many ways, the way we perceive the world. We conceived Househedz not simply as a performance but rather as performed scholarship (mixing critical performance ethnography and autoethnographic modes). We strove to situate our stories as micro-refractions of a larger story, of a community, of a regional experience gone global, evolving over time and space. We felt that house, as a social phenomenon, was (and still is) in dire need of critical theorizing. Indeed, house provides an active site/space to theorize globalization, regional/multiple performances of “blackness,” the cosmopolitan/provincial, the sacred/profane, humanism, love, beauty, gender/sexuality/class/ethnicity/national belonging as fluid constructions (though not without contest and tensions), and the persistent trope of embodied memory (as stories of struggle/survival/success) across Black diaspora.
When we began work on the project, I had recently returned from two years of fieldwork in Trinidad and while I love Trinidad’s rich musical/performance complex (calypso, soca, pan, bottle & spoon, jouvert, bongo, bele, chutney, chutney soca, etc.) being away also intensified questions about my own cultural experience: Was I part of a folk tradition? Were there songs and dances that rang of a unique vernacular experience in my own backyard? Handgames, “Miss Mary Mack,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” stepping, the Smurf, the Wop, the Prep, jacking, etc. were the practices that reminded me of home...Most of all, I realized Chicago house occupied that space for me.
House is a metropolitan folk form, merging working class rural roots with the modern-day urbane. As a DJ friend of mine quipped, “How did Chicago black folk come to love industrial blips and bleeps?” With the entrée of acid house, Chicago’s sound became electronic noise matched with percussive rhythm. Yet it also remained a blues-R&B-funk sound, marked by blazing disco-laced soulful vocals, church sermon cadences and gospel shouts. It was/is old and new. It was/is a through-line of history marking the migration and settlement of black folk along a South to North axis. It was/is a pregnant site of embodied history, of epic memory. Unpacking these strands, I imagine house’s potential to tell a multilayered story about the US African American experience, carving concentric circles outward – local, regional, national, hemispheric, global. House is not just a story of Chicago; it is a story about popular music/dance and the world.
In such a way, Househedz explores Chicago house, unpacking its movement vocabulary and style; its exploration and fusion of spirituality and sexuality; its changing contexts from club, to basement, to radio station, to mix tape and CD; and its current revitalization. Essential to this highly localized culture is the creation and use of “home-made” or “house” music that both lyrically and thematically encouraged and cultivated an atmosphere resembling a social utopia of racial and sexual equality and unity through a Chicago-style youth-based social dance culture. Recent revivals – as demonstrated by the success of Chicago Summer Dance Project’s House Wednesdays (especially in the summers of 2004 & 2005), 5 Magazine, and a surge of house collectives and themed nights at bars/lounges/clubs across the city– display house as a fertile ground for investigation.
Further, the local phenomenon of Chicago house represents the diversity of black experience in America’s Midwest region. Through the development, performance, and outreach activities of this project, we place Chicago house on a continuum with other American music/dance idioms including jazz, rock & roll, R&B and hip hop, noting the significance these African American-derived cultural productions have had on the overall development of America’s national culture and beyond.
Meida McNeal
Artistic Director, TRPC
Our work shifts between personal narrative-stories and larger macro-societal forces, creating collage-like meditations that focus on the dialogue/dialectic between individual agency, collective space and the larger cultural, social, political and economic issues that frame our daily lives. Past works have dealt with issues of women creating safe “home” spaces (Home Stories, 2001); understanding the African diaspora’s significance to local African American women (Bag Ladies, 2002); and intercultural negotiations of race and nation/citizenship issues between the disparate cultures/nations of Trinidad/Caribbean and Chicago/America (Race Travels, 2004).
In 2006, TRPC began to develop Househedz. A cultural context deeply familiar to most of us, we wanted to approach house’s impact on our lives – how it affects the way we move and, in many ways, the way we perceive the world. We conceived Househedz not simply as a performance but rather as performed scholarship (mixing critical performance ethnography and autoethnographic modes). We strove to situate our stories as micro-refractions of a larger story, of a community, of a regional experience gone global, evolving over time and space. We felt that house, as a social phenomenon, was (and still is) in dire need of critical theorizing. Indeed, house provides an active site/space to theorize globalization, regional/multiple performances of “blackness,” the cosmopolitan/provincial, the sacred/profane, humanism, love, beauty, gender/sexuality/class/ethnicity/national belonging as fluid constructions (though not without contest and tensions), and the persistent trope of embodied memory (as stories of struggle/survival/success) across Black diaspora.
When we began work on the project, I had recently returned from two years of fieldwork in Trinidad and while I love Trinidad’s rich musical/performance complex (calypso, soca, pan, bottle & spoon, jouvert, bongo, bele, chutney, chutney soca, etc.) being away also intensified questions about my own cultural experience: Was I part of a folk tradition? Were there songs and dances that rang of a unique vernacular experience in my own backyard? Handgames, “Miss Mary Mack,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” stepping, the Smurf, the Wop, the Prep, jacking, etc. were the practices that reminded me of home...Most of all, I realized Chicago house occupied that space for me.
House is a metropolitan folk form, merging working class rural roots with the modern-day urbane. As a DJ friend of mine quipped, “How did Chicago black folk come to love industrial blips and bleeps?” With the entrée of acid house, Chicago’s sound became electronic noise matched with percussive rhythm. Yet it also remained a blues-R&B-funk sound, marked by blazing disco-laced soulful vocals, church sermon cadences and gospel shouts. It was/is old and new. It was/is a through-line of history marking the migration and settlement of black folk along a South to North axis. It was/is a pregnant site of embodied history, of epic memory. Unpacking these strands, I imagine house’s potential to tell a multilayered story about the US African American experience, carving concentric circles outward – local, regional, national, hemispheric, global. House is not just a story of Chicago; it is a story about popular music/dance and the world.
In such a way, Househedz explores Chicago house, unpacking its movement vocabulary and style; its exploration and fusion of spirituality and sexuality; its changing contexts from club, to basement, to radio station, to mix tape and CD; and its current revitalization. Essential to this highly localized culture is the creation and use of “home-made” or “house” music that both lyrically and thematically encouraged and cultivated an atmosphere resembling a social utopia of racial and sexual equality and unity through a Chicago-style youth-based social dance culture. Recent revivals – as demonstrated by the success of Chicago Summer Dance Project’s House Wednesdays (especially in the summers of 2004 & 2005), 5 Magazine, and a surge of house collectives and themed nights at bars/lounges/clubs across the city– display house as a fertile ground for investigation.
Further, the local phenomenon of Chicago house represents the diversity of black experience in America’s Midwest region. Through the development, performance, and outreach activities of this project, we place Chicago house on a continuum with other American music/dance idioms including jazz, rock & roll, R&B and hip hop, noting the significance these African American-derived cultural productions have had on the overall development of America’s national culture and beyond.
Meida McNeal
Artistic Director, TRPC
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Latest page update: made by isislady
, Dec 6 2008, 8:59 AM EST
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Moved from: Househedz (2006-2007) / ThickRoutes Performance Collage
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