Movement Building through MixedTape with DJ Lynnèe Denise

Sunday, December 6, 2015 10:00 am-12:00 pm

[ Mastery Charter School - 927 Johnston Street ]

Click [here] to RSVP

Leeway and Girls Rock Philly presents Movement Building through MixedTape with DJ Lynnèe Denise. In this class, participants will be introduced to “DJ Scholarship”, a practice that shifts the role of DJ as purveyor of party music to archivist and cultural worker who collects, preserves, and performs the history and music of marginalized communities and their movements. Lynnèe will breakdown the creation of her project, Afro-Digital Migration: House Music in Post Apartheid South Africa. In it, Lynnèe explored how house music took root in South Africa and shaped its national identity in defiance of and resistance to apartheid. Workshop participants will create a mixed tape as a cultural project, and will learn about process steps including documentation, podcasting, publishing and communicating the social value of your project for funding. Sunday, December 6 from 10:00am-12:00pm at Mastery Charter School (927 Johnston Street). The workshop is free, but you must RSVP.

About Lynnée Denise

For the past decade, DJ Lynnée Denise has worked as an artist who incorporates self-directed project based research into interactive workshops, music events and public lectures that offer participants the opportunity to develop an intimate relationship with under-explored topics related to the cultural history of marginalized communities.  She creates multi dimensional and multi sensory experiences that require audiences to apply critical thinking to how the arts can hold viable solutions to social inequality. She coined the term “DJ Scholarship” to explain DJ culture as a mix-mode research practice, both performative and subversive in its ability to shape and define social experiences, shifting the public perception of the role of a DJ from being a purveyor of party music to an archivist, cultural worker and information specialist who assesses, collects, organizes, preserves, and provides access to music determined to have long-term value. This shift in perspective manifests most clearly in the presentation of her work at universities, cultural conferences and performance venues where she creates spaces for public dialogue to occur using music as an entry point to bridge the gap between socially acceptable forms of knowledge and nontraditional ones. Her work is informed and inspired by underground cultural movements, the 1980s, migration studies, theories of escape, and electronic music of the African Diaspora.  With support from the Jerome Foundation Travel Grant, The Astrae Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Idea Capital, Residency BiljmAIR (Netherlands) and The Rauschenberg Artists as Activists Grant, she has been able to resource her performative research on a local, national and global level. She’s the product of the Historically Black Fisk University, with a MA from the historically radical San Francisco State University Ethnic Studies department. Currently Lynnée Denise works as an adjunct professor in the Pan African Studies Department at California State University Los Angeles.

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