JUKE CRY HAND CLAP
Juke Cry Hand Clap is an extended exploration of Chicago house music & dance culture as a significant phenomenon of American contemporary culture. The work sources the earlier cultural resonances in the connections we have always felt on dance floors, in social spaces, and in house community interactions. Clapping, moaning, polyrhythm, closeness, intimacy, vulnerability, love, expression. House, or at least the way we experienced it growing up, draws on and then modernizes the blues, jazz, gospel, soul, and disco genres that precede it.
Credit: Tonika “Toni” Johnson
JCHC is about the ways we identify Chicago house as being older than itself. Sounds, rhythms, language, fashion, attitudes, acts passed down, and codes of social belonging that help us understand ourselves as members of house fellowship. Making community. Embracing all kinds of bodies and lifestyles. Finding power in pleasure. Finding pleasure in the body. Finding catharsis in movement and music. Learning to live with difference.
House takes on different musical styles creolizing and incorporating them in layered ways that are sometimes harmonious and sometimes in tension, sometimes seamless and sometimes raw and rugged in their stitching. Juke Cry Hand Clap honors “house” as a consciousness, aesthetic and life perspective.
2014 Performance at Mana Contemporary
Credit: D-Star Photography
