Moving Toward Unity - 3/30/2006

MIT professor connects house and hip-hop

By Dennis Romero

While thousands of clubgoers around the world were packing their bags for the house-fueled Miami heat of last week's dance-music conferences, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology theater arts and dance professor was staging a groundbreaking piece in cold New England. Miami's DJ-worshipping events have drawn hip-hop kings such as Diddy and celebrity queens such as Paris Hilton, despite house music's failure to really penetrate the charts. But MIT associate professor Thomas DeFrantz's show could radically change how house music is perceived and performed.

DeFrantz's "House Music Project" was intended to provoke thought about the black, gay roots of post-disco house music and the way the genre has been cast aside in American popular culture (only to be called off the bench now and then by Madonna, Madison Avenue, and Miami). But, on the road to an avant-garde performance, DeFrantz came across an ingenious way to communicate e-music. Software customized for the piece by MIT graduates Eto Oro and James Tolbert allows the professor to take center stage as a club dancer, controlling and cross-fading music samples and tracks via his body movement. Sensors on each wrist and ankle, along with two on his back, help send wireless signals to a computer that contains electronic music tracks.

"Through the piece I can adjust volume, tempo, forward or backward play, frequency, highs, lows," says DeFrantz, an expert in African American dance history. "I'm like a human equalizer. The point is to physicalize what house is."

He intended in part to critique the mainstream forces that have pushed house music underground while giving its close cousin hip-hop a ride to the top. But "unintentionally" is often how media evolves, and, in this case, the possible uses for the body sensors are intriguing. Videogames such as Dance Dance Revolution already rely on up-tempo dance music to fuel a step-mimicking program. Adding creative body movement could be, well, revolutionary. The sensors could also be used to make original music, control video, and even DJ via body moves. "That wasn't really my inspiration, but the commercial possibilities are huge," the professor acknowledges.

DeFrantz's five-movement show takes place in and around a house he had built and placed on stage at MIT's Kresge Little Theater in Cambridge. A DJ helps him keep the beat. A couple of hip-hop-oriented breakdancers work opposite more fluid house dancers, and the music becomes cacophonous when DeFrantz cross-fades the two genres.

"There's a basic story about disco and funk giving birth to hip-hop and house," he says, "even though the two new genres eye each other warily - hip-hop being excessively masculine and perhaps even rockist, and house being more feminine and welcoming and nurturing and a gay space if you will."

At the dawn of the '80s, the raw, beat-heavy sound of house provided voice and shelter to the repressed, and after-hours house scenes sometimes resembled boisterous gospel churches - hooting, hollering, and foot-stomping included. When house was mixed with the drug ecstasy on the Spanish isle of Ibiza in the mid-'80s, it became the soundtrack to raves and clubbing, and it continues to thrive in the global underground.

DeFrantz likes to contrast this development with hip-hop's. Rappers in the '70s and even '80s often adopted a feminized, tight-pants-and-sequined-suit-wearing stance familiar to disco and house fans, but the rap game grew homophobic, angry, and even sometimes loathingly gangster as it came to dominate much of mainstream music's non-black fan base.

"House was originally conceived as a place for queer folks to get together," DeFrantz says. "That's a lot of why it got shoved aside. Hip-hop fit with the times better. Black America needed a certain aggressiveness to understand itself under President Reagan. House is inclusive and spiritual, and it connects the people through movement. It might be back again."

In fact, one point of his show, which he hopes to take on a nationwide tour, "is that hip-hop and house have to figure out how to communicate," he says.

"At the end of the piece," he adds, "we invite the hip-hop and house dancers to groove together."