divadelight.org

As the lights rise after the dance, each face is wiped clean of sweat…

Throughout discourses on House Music, the primary focus is situated within the realm and world of the DJ. Powerful and potent with the ability to control numerous bodies simultaneously, the DJ is a source of joy and admiration to the children of house. But there is yet another image, another icon, another enigma:  the House Diva. The diva in house music and other transgressive dance music texts vocally articulates the subliminal desires, unrealized ecstasies, and hopeful yearnings of house enthusiasts worldwide. ‘Diva Delight’ is a subjective mediation mixed with personal thoughts and abstract speculations on house music and house divas. From a profound love of the music, this project centers the diva through the performative cultural practice called house.

There are many informative websites and diverse forms of documentation on house music and club culture. Diva Delight wishes to enter these dialogues with an emphasis on the theoretical and analytical configurations of this music and culture. The Diva Delight website grew out of a growing interest in the creative technologies of computers and the cyber realm, democratizing voices, notions of otherness, diasporic travels, media activism and a generous curiosity. It is an interactive part of research on ethnographic methodologies, cultural capital, industries, and economies, queer theory, critical race and gender studies, cultural expressivities and modes of identification through distinct music texts.

Although house music and club culture enjoys diverse audiences around in the world, a primary focus of Diva Delight is placed upon the assumed racialized and so-called ‘non-normative’ sexualities and genders in the historical formation and subsequent relationships of particular communities to house music and club cultures.

Diva Delight expresses gratitude to the many friends, mentors, and colleagues in various political, social, cultural, and academic environments that forward the growth of house enthusiasts in the classroom, out in the community and on the dancefloor.

Princess TamTam

In addition to dance music divas, the alias and personae of Diva Delight’s Princess TamTam pays homage to the classic divas of the Harlem Renaissance by utilizing the appellation of the chanteuse in Josephine Baker’s 1935 French film ‘Princess Tam Tam.’

Here, Princess TamTam merely strives to be a writer and documentarian on house music and culture through the tool of ‘Diva Delight.’ One who attempts to textually present a visual of clubbing experiences by the deployment of a fluid narration. A disguise of so-called first and third person, persons, things.  A flexible variant of the ‘i’, the ‘we’, the ’she’, and the ‘it’.  Unabashedly subjective and candidly frank most times, this tool  is informed by her own lived experiences, and selfishly, with no affinities to parlay to or entertain. In essence, her declarations are one of many personal and worded narratives of house music, a primarily audible culture experienced and heard within the spatial context of the club.

The author forewarns site visitors about the particulars of her partiality in musics, scenes and cultures. Hence, the perception of her words is simply a personal communicatory expression and style to creatively and consciously grow and learn through and with music. Given this framework, ‘house’ is more than the technicalities of musical configurations for Princess TamTam. It becomes the people, her interaction with them, the vibe of the club, dancefloor chatter, attire, the dj, the divas, the dancers, and more. If readers will have her, Princess TamTam hopes to present to you a chance to experience it through her words and lens.

Princess TamTam’s master’s thesis examined globalization and gay iconicity of black female performance in disco and house music. Current doctoral research will also incorporate cities as geographical sites of affinity, fetishization and/or formulations of diaspora through disparate music scenes within processes of globalization and late capitalism.  As such, this research will continue to engage the nuanced gestures and conceptualized technologies (techniques and tools) and/or negations of race, gender, sexuality, class, otherness and contested universalities through circulation, production, dissemination, consumption, and industry in popular musics with an emphasis on vocal expressivities in electronic dance music during the 1990’s.