* Registration is not required but it helps us plan and you can suggest songs to add to the collective playlist *
A fun, healthy & energetic way to start your day. Free, iced coffee & fresh juice while supplies last!
Join students, staff, faculty, and community members as we gather to dance in and around the Maxwell Museum’s “cave” that’s part of our Ancestors exhibit. As musician Jorge Drexler reminds us in his song, Bailar en la Cueva: Humans were making music more than 12,000 years ago, way before we invented agriculture. As such, come celebrate humanity's creativity through art + movement!
In this “Asian Underground Edition” of our popular dance party, we are honored to be working with the UNM Asian American and Pacific Islander Resource Center (AAPIRC). We will be welcoming Farah Nousheen and Sikandar Awan, also known as DJ Malik.
Farah will be leading guests in warm-up & cool down yoga sessions. (Bring your own yoga mat or borrow one of ours.) Farah is the Student Success Specialist for UNM’s Asian American Pacific Islander Resource Center (AAPIRC). She is also the Founder & Yoga Instructor at Yoga for People of Color Sangha, which created spaces for local holistic healing and empowerment for people of color, following the fatal election of 2016. It was very active until 2023, and members continue to have offerings in the community. Farah has a 500-hour certification focusing on trauma-informed yoga for marginalized communities. From 2017 to 2022, she was the founding facilitator of the Asian Women Resting Circle hosted by the New Mexico Asian Family Center. Farah has been offering yoga for students at AAPIRC. For the Spring 2024 semester, she leads the Yoga for Peace of Mind & Body on Thursdays 2-3pm in SUB Santa Ana A&B.
DJ Malik is a UNM graduate student, world traveler, and talented musician who specializes in what he calls “ethnic house” music, a mix and combination of techno, deep house, progressive with South Asian and Middle Eastern beats. He will be providing the soundscape to our yoga sessions and the dance party.
Blending Eastern sounds with electro and drum’n’bass, the Asian Underground music movement was birthed in the 1990s in London by the children of South Asian immigrants of the 1960s. This new generation of British Asians (Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, etc) mixed South Asian classical instruments like tabla and sitar, Punjabi bhangra, folk music, songs of sufi legends such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, retro Bollywood, jazz and the 90s club sounds of dub, drum’n’bass and jungle. The term and sounds grew from the weekly London club night Anokha with Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawhney, and others. The music of these first generation immigrants was a direct response to the racial discrimination they experienced growing up. Today, the Asian Underground movement has expanded to hybrid electronic music within South Asia itself along with the migration movements of South Asian diaspora.
More info:
Rethinking The Asian Underground w/ Daytimers, DJ Ritu & Nabinah Igba https://soundcloud.com/daytimers_uk/rethinking-the-asian-underground-w-daytimers-dj-ritu-nabihah-iqbal
Asian Underground Music for Us, By Us https://themusicscool.in/asian-underground-music-for-us-by-us/
The birth of Asian underground: ‘This music was for us and by us, and that was very powerful’: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jan/11/asian-underground-music-eastern-electro-drumnbass
For more info about Dancing in the Cave visit our Museum blog
