Lecture
Kuduro is a dance-music-complex from Angola that relies on fast-paced, rhythmic tracks that are computer produced. Over the propulsive beats, dancers perform rapid and often shocking moves called toques and vocalists chant raspy non-pitched lines in a style called animação.
An intense impetus called carga (“charge”) marks a good kuduro performance. Kuduristas liken the experience of carga to adrenaline and as such link it to the frantic pace of life and constant tension in the Angolan capital Luanda. This discourse DJ set examines how kuduro in the setting of the globalised African mega-city Luanda speaks of a mixture of pleasure and trauma that is not only reflective of a violent past but also productive in the present.
Stefanie Alisch is a musicologist at HU Berlin, where she heads the DFG-funded Emmy Noether Group ‘Sound System Epistemologies: Knowledge Engendered Through Practice’. She has combined her own long-standing DJ experience with academic research projects on broken beat in London, on the electronic dance music genre known as kuduro from Angola, and on the mazurka as a transcontinental dance music form. She acted as chair of popular music studies at the HU Berlin and of ethnomusicology at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her numerous academic courses, lectures and publications focus on the music and dance cultures of the Black Atlantic. Dr Stefanie Alisch and her team are currently investigating how, in the context of sound systems – speaker towers, DJs, MCs and bass – the construction of masculinity and the production of knowledge co-constitute each other.
Webpage: https://hu-berlin.academia.edu/StefanieAlisch
lnstagram: @stef__sound
Lecture: October 17, 3 pm / Flutgraben
Photo: Kudurista dances at Cidaela stadium, Luanda, by Paulino Cinquenta Damião © 2011