How Dweller Charts a Path Through Black Queer Spaces

There are music festivals, and then there’s Dweller. The exuberant celebration of Black electronic music has grown into something of a community holiday for Black artists, music lovers, and dance-floor denizens alike. Every February, giddy audiences converge around a tight collection of New York City venues as the festival creates a rare context in which Black voices and bodies are indisputably centered. In an industry that has spent decades white-washing the origins of techno, it’s hard to overstate Dweller’s impact as a space for reaffirmation. Cocurators Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson and Ryan Clarke have noted that it has come to serve as a polyvocal response to a pressing question: Who does techno belong to?

Founded in 2019 by Hutchinson—one of the forces behind the celebrated collective Discwoman, which consists entirely of women and nonbinary DJs—Dweller has become known for its fluid, intergenerational approach to honoring Black electronic music. Over the years, Hutchinson, Clarke, and fellow curator Enyo Amexo have platformed legends like Theo Parrish, Robert Hood, and Stacey Hotwaxx Hale right alongside more recent luminaries like DJ Lag, Josey Rebelle, and Tygapaw, creating opportunities for the kind of late-night euphoria that has become hard to find in New York’s increasingly precarious and stratified club scene.

Dweller has also made a habit of holding space for slower and quieter modes of engagement. Since its first edition, the festival has presented screenings, poetry readings, and artist-led discussions that pay tribute to the impact of electronic music across disciplines. Now mostly presented under the banner of an annual Educational Night, organized by poet and frequent collaborator S*an D. Henry-Smith, these offerings often set the tone for Dweller’s six-day jubilee.

This year, to celebrate Dweller’s fifth edition, Clarke and Henry-Smith have teamed up with Criterion’s own curatorial director, Ashley Clark, to organize Radical Dreams, Underground Sounds, a collection of films that celebrates Black experimentalism and imagination on and off the dance floor. From Afrofuturist classics like John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History (1996) to undercelebrated chronicles of New York’s dance scene like Josell Ramos’s Maestro (2003), the works in this lineup form a kaleidoscope of genres and eras.

With Radical Dreams, Underground Sounds now streaming on the Criterion Channel, I sat down with Clarke and Henry-Smith to discuss their selections, communal dreaming, and the transcendence of the club.

Yeah, and I think we could also meditate more broadly on the fact that, particularly for those of us who are Black and queer, the club is like a church space that feels safe.: Henry-Smith: Yeah, I think of gospel music, which I personally feel quite isolated from. I’ve separated myself from church, and from family in that [religious] regard. But to hear [music] in a club setting and with people who maybe also have experience with rejection [by religious institutions] . . . we can all just be. Just be in the same room talking about being trans.

Clarke: I come from a Southern Baptist background, so when I see those moments of transcendence superimpose themselves on each other, it means something. The outline of the divine [becomes] available for us to fill in.

Another theme that comes up in the films is the difficulty of maintaining these Black queer spaces as a refuge, particularly as we have a lot of outsiders—many of them white—who are trying to co-opt these spaces or “discover” them for their own purposes. A few examples that I’m thinking of are Maestro, Shakedown (2018, directed by Leilah Weinraub), and Trial Period (2023, directed by Kiernan Francis). Could you talk about why it felt important to tease this theme out in the series?: Clarke: I choose to see beauty in the fact that a lot of Black art has to express difficulty—not as this unconscious fixation on trauma but as an honest way of showing a way through this life. Black nightlife has always been very responsive to this impulse, both in what is listened to together and in what the group collectively believes is meaningful in the act of consistent congregation. That sense of social maintenance as survival, joy, pleasure, and aid seems to only increase the more Western culture pushes you to the margins.

In my opinion, it’s a beautifully decentralized system of mutually reconstructing from nothing a humanity that has previously been stripped from us. That alone deserves to be heralded while also being directly responded to with material care by all of us. Plus, the music and the movement are amazing on their own merits. It’s what we like to watch.

I’m thinking about the montage of club flyers in Shakedown and the ways we keep the memory of these spaces alive in the digital age when we don’t have these physical remnants anymore. Could you talk about how you’re preserving the memory of Black club spaces in these films specifically and through Dweller more broadly?: Clarke: Ephemerality is so important. In its fleetingness it holds a better sense of feeling than the long form. But as we get further from certain points in dance-music history, those that never went to many (or any) of these nights wish to get a sense of them—maybe to carry on tradition or to know what not to do. These films hold legitimate information on Black social history to preserve it not simply as a biased gesture of ancestor worship but as useful clues to better our own situation. A team that is making that effort right now that comes to mind is this techno collective/party out in Detroit called Blueprint, which has a podcast of the same name. It’s run by DJ Etta, AK, and Blackmoonchild, and they’re doing oral histories from women DJs who were pushed to the edge of techno’s history. It’s work like that that we hope we’re in conversation with.

Henry-Smith: We are the keeper of our archives. We understand what about our lives is beautiful and amorphous and particular. There’s such an urgency in documenting, witnessing, participating in Black spaces, Black queer spaces, Black trans spaces, [where] the dance floor is a refuge for the rejected. We’re just making a thing that we’ve also been looking for and have needed ourselves.

We started this conversation by talking about Dweller’s past and present. I want to close out by talking about what you envision for Dweller’s future.: Clarke: Long-term, my hope is that Dweller can be understood as a protective object, but one that needs protection itself. So many of the films have a similar message.

Henry-Smith: My dream is that it remains what it is in a certain way. It’s really just this gathering space that lets a lot of different perspectives and experiences of this thing called Blackness gather and touch. To be in adoration and protection of that—of a tradition, a legacy, a history. I hope it just remains a space for Black expression.

How Dweller Charts a Path Through Black Queer Spaces

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