Dr. Micah Salkind is the Deputy Director of The City of Providence Department of Art, Culture, and Tourism and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Department of American Studies at Brown University. As part of his work, he collaborates with large non-profit cultural institutions as well as emerging artists, designers, and creative entrepreneurs. He also serves on the boards of the Providence Public Library and Community MusicWorks and is an ongoing collaborator with dancers and scholars in Chicago’s Honey Pot Performance collective and Matthew Cumbie Projects’ “Growing Our Own Gardens” initiative.
A DJ, sound designer, and curator, he is the author of Do You Remember House? Chicago’s Queer of Color Undergrounds for which these oral history interviews were collected. The work "historicizes house music, the rhythmically focused electronic dance sound born in the post-industrial maroon spaces of Chicago's queer, black, and Latino social dancers. Working from oral history interviews, archival research, and performance ethnography, it argues that the remediation and adaptation of house by multiple and overlapping crossover communities in its first decade shaped the ways that contemporary Chicago house music producers, DJs, dancers, and promoters re-remember and re-animate house as an archive indexing experiences of queer of colour congregation."
Currently, the audio files and biographical information are available; transcripts will be added when complete.
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Interview with Marlon 'Jo de Presser' Billups
Micah Salkind
Marlon “Jo de Presser” Billups is a DJ, Poet, and currently, Music Curator and Collaborator for Honey Pot Performance. Jo de has been DJing in the Chicago House scene since 1987. Starting at DiVinci Manor with promoter Quik Claude. He DJ’ed alongside such Chicago House legends as Lil’ Louis, Farley Jackmaster Funk, Gene Hunt, Terry Hunter, and more. His works of poetry and spoken word have been published by Third World Press, Chicago State University, Robert Morris University and more. He has performed poetry and DJ’ed in Festivals, Clubs, Radio Stations, Universities, and in various cities and Canada.
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Interview with Meida Teresa McNeal
Micah Salkind
Meida Teresa McNeal is Artistic and Managing Director of Honey Pot Performance. She received her PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and her MFA in Choreography & Dance History from Ohio State University. Over the past two decades, she has produced numerous creative projects as both a solo artist and with Honey Pot Performance, with works performed in Illinois, Rhode Island, Ohio, California, and Trinidad. Positioning her work as an Independent Artist and Scholar at the intersection of performance studies, dance and critical ethnography, she has taught courses in dance, critical performance ethnography, and black diasporic cultural production at Northwestern University, Brown University, Governors State, and Columbia College Chicago. McNeal also works with the Chicago Park District as Arts & Culture Manager supporting community arts partnerships, youth arts, cultural stewardship, and civic engagement initiatives across the city’s parks and cultural centers. Whether creating new work, facilitating a workshop, building community partnerships and programs around shared public space, teaching, or writing, for Meida all roads lead to the merging of theory and practice into lived applications that cultivate dialogue, decolonize knowledge, and shift consciousness.
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Interview with Michael Ezebukwu
Micah Salkind
Michael Ezebukwu was a foundational underground disco DJ in Chicago who performed at venues like the Private Sculpture Room, Rialto Tap, Sauer’s, Dingbats and Club LaRay. His work influenced a generation of DJs who shepherded house music from queer of color social spaces to South Side teen spaces and more mainstream crossover spaces throughout the city.
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Interview with Michael Serafini
Micah Salkind
Michael Serafini grew up in the Bridgeport neighborhood, attending Brother Rice high school, where Ron Hardy DJ’d some of the school dances. As a teen Serafini loved dancing and dance music, and was always drawn to alternative scenes and sounds - he would party at teen venues like Prime and Tender, where the Hot Mix 5 DJs performed, and later carried records for Teri Bristol during her days spinning at Medusas, Shelter and Crobar. He was a mainstay as a dancer in the house music scene, and its gay/punk offshoots, for years before he took over ownership of the legendary Gramaphone Records. Today he is a founder and resident DJ at Smartbar’s Sunday Queen! Party.