Last Night a DJ Took My Life

Euro Dance – that’s dance music from the hitmakers of Europe, from Italy, the Netherlands and of course Germany and Switzerland. Catchy melodies in simple Euro-English, about love, sex, partying and an ideal world where Black and white live together in harmony.

This doesn’t really line up with the common practice of white, male music producers hiring Black women to sing the catchy hooks while denying them any exploitation rights. In Last Night a DJ Took My Life, choreographer and director Joana Tischkau sets out to reveal the structures behind successful 1990s chart acts such as DJ Bobo, C&C Music Factory, Captain Hollywood Project, Technotronic and Culture Beat.

Last Night a DJ Took My Life will be Joana Tischkaus first work at the Schauspielhaus Zürich. Already in her acclaimed work Being Pick Ain’t Easy Tischkau took the fragility of social constructions such as race and gender as her starting point. In Karneval, on the other hand, she approached the topic of cultural appropriation during carnival, questioned this practice of German festive culture – and was invited to the Radikal jung festival in Munich with it.