When Eliabe de Freitas walked into his first Batekoo party at a heaving club in São Paulo, he felt like he was opening a door onto a different life. “It was the first party where I felt comfortable in my own skin. I saw so many different shades of Black and so much acceptance,” he remembers. The party demonstrated to de Freitas that if you want power, there is strength in numbers.
In recent years, DJ collectives have emerged in dance scenes around the world to demand better treatment and greater visibility for marginalized artists and communities. Whether they’re throwing parties, training new talent, launching record labels or agitating for safer dancefloors, every collective tells a unique story about a local culture. Four of them – Batekoo in Brazil, No Shade in Germany, NÓTT in Colombia and Oramics in Poland – are not only throwing some of the best parties in the business, they’re also having a significant impact on their communities.
No Shade was founded in 2017 as a training scheme for women and non-binary DJs in Berlin. “For an individual or a collective to claim to be apolitical is not realistic at all,” states Folly Ghost, who joined No Shade after moving to Berlin from Rio de Janeiro. That includes clubbers and DJs: “Every action you take, whatever your identity represents, it is a political statement.” Their crew believe that dancefloors are a space that can be moulded, not only to make dancing safer and more accessible, but to nudge society towards their egalitarian ideals. Representation is just the beginning.
Colombian DJ Juliana Cuervo joined her first collective, Move, to throw secret parties while avoiding Medellín’s corrupt police and offering a platform for women DJs. Frustrated that so few women were breaking into the techno scene, not just in Colombia but across South America, Cuervo then teamed up with two friends to build a database of all the women DJs in the region, proving to promoters that the talent was already out there – they just needed gigs. Since then, the feminist collective NÓTT has employed various tactics to infiltrate the scene, from running workshops on synths and visuals to releasing a compilation album of South American women.
“The main situation was that women were afraid to start a career in [techno]. There’s this idea that the technology is not for us,” says Cuervo. NÓTT DJs are constantly battling ideas about how they ought to behave. “For my mum it was so hard to understand that I would not get married, that I’m a DJ and I’m travelling the world right now,” says Cuervo. “It’s something really strange and new for her, and for my country.”
Batekoo co-founder Mauricio Sacramento was facing similar exclusion when he decided to throw himself a birthday party in 2014, an event that became the founding legend of the collective. Though Salvador is home to one of Brazil’s largest Black communities, Miranda often encountered racism when he went clubbing. But in the years since its launch, Batekoo has become a nationwide phenomenon and a haven for queer Black youth.
De Freitas, who joined soon after his first Batekoo experience and now runs its record label, says the collective is a celebration of the African diaspora in Brazil. The party is “a representation of everything that we know as music,” including genres that have long been devalued because of their association with poor Black communities. Central to that is funk (or baile funk), which was born in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro; the DJs also play dancehall, trap, hip-hop and R&B. In a gesture of solidarity, ticket prices are kept low and trans people come in for free as “our special guests,” he adds, “because these people need to feel safer than anyone else.”
In Berlin, No Shade has been transforming the city’s dancefloors through its DJ school, which had almost 100 applicants in 2019. But increasing the number of women in the scene isn’t just about helping a chosen few to make money. “It’s no secret that the music industry is dominated by cis men, so giving people an opportunity to change that is something that benefits the music industry,” says crew member Kikelomo. “With diversity, you get broader perspectives. You’re inspiring a new generation, so you get new sounds.”
Collectives like theirs even seem to be having an impact on the rest of the music industry. “A lot of other festivals are getting more diverse,” says No Shade member Nathassia, who DJs as PERIGGA. “Many people have reached out to us to say they were inspired to start their own collectives. We are not the only ones doing this, but we’re part of this movement.”
In Poland, the collective known as Oramics – named after the female electronic pioneer Daphne Oram – forms a multi-city network of women, non-binary and trans artists. Among them is Monster, a Poznań-based DJ also known as Moli. She suggests that the turn towards collectivism is also a response to an increasingly “DJ-idolising” scene. “Clubbing did not start out like this – it started with raves where very often you couldn’t even see the DJ,” she points out. “So I feel like there’s a wave of collectives trying to make it less individualistic. It’s not about the DJ, it’s about the experience of the party.”
One of the top priorities for the Oramics crew is to make dancefloors safer. “Every time I go to one of those techno parties where the line-up is 100 percent male, then 90 percent of the dancefloor is male too. And when there are so many men around you just don’t feel safe,” Moli says. “Having more women creates a better atmosphere on the dance floor.”
Batekoo’s existence feels even more vital since the election of Jair Bolsonaro, a self-declared homophobe; Brazil already has the highest LGBTQ+ murder rate in the world. Yet despite the political context, Batekoo is thriving. As well as bringing thousands of people to their parties nationwide, the collective has evolved into a real company, with partners and a board. “We have meetings, we sit and design strategies for the things we want to do,” says de Freitas. “It’s very corporate in this sense! We go to the office every day, we have our financial goals.”
By operating as a business, de Freitas hopes that Batekoo can have an even bigger effect on Brazilian society. Instead of taking corporate money to sponsor their Pride parade, for instance, Batekoo persuaded one company to invest in a permanent space for the collective where they host courses on DJing, event security, and other kinds of cultural entrepreneurialism. Such sponsors “think they are helping us,” he laughs, “but it’s actually the other way around.”
As more DJs club together to demand fairer treatment, safer spaces and increased visibility, it’s striking how much impact they can have on the world around them – not just in the dance underground, but into the cultural mainstream. The Batekoo crowd were once dismissed as undesirables; now they’re courted as influencers. “What we learned from the election is that we are stronger than ever,” says de Freitas. “It’s difficult to fight alone, but we saw that being together and caring for each other was the most important thing we could do.”
Text: Chal Ravens (Beatport)
www.beatportal.com
You are all set!
Your first Culture Weekly will arrive this week.