Star of the Year: The Black Madonna
Midwest native taking the true spirit of Chicago house to the world
It's 11pm on a Sunday in September and Panoramabar is full. You can feel the love that's created when several hundred people are locked in and loving it. "That was my best experience that I've ever had there," Marea Stamper, 38, recalls. "It can be really intimidating the first few times you play there. But now I'm comfortable."
She's since returned several times, with fans turning up with flowers and cards. Her vibrant taste in house is a perfect fit for the Berlin institution – as it is at Robert Johnson, Concrete, Dance Tunnel and Lux, all of which she's played this year. Her bookings have doubled in 2015 as promoters and dancers have caught on to her powerful, good-times DJ sets.
Growing up in Kentucky, she started raving in '91 and graduated to throwing parties in '94. She moved to Chicago in her 20s and became a resident at Smart Bar, alongside Derrick Carter and Frankie Knuckles. She also booked the club, nurturing a range of LGBT club nights and DJs, and set up Daphne, a month-long series focusing on women. She's now Smart Bar's Musical Director.
"We want a club that looks like Chicago, that's full of women and men of many different colours and gender expressions," she says. "This is a rich city and that's what house music looks like too."
Her interviews and online articles, as well as separate initiatives like Discwoman, Sister and Very Male Line-ups, have prompted dance music to take a look at itself in 2015. "There are people who want to be involved in dance music who don't share the experience of straight, white, affluent men."
We applaud her, but she brushes it off: "Trying to do the right thing is not something we should be rewarded for. Dance music is about joy and hedonism but part of that is safety and refuge. I think that caring what happens to other people is the price of admission to humanity and it blows my mind that this is somehow a point of difference." While many use the spirit of house as a fashion statement, The Black Madonna truly embodies it.
Boiler Room
From Chicago's legendary Gramaphone record shop, this helped put The Black Madonna on the map.
20 Women Who Shaped The History of Dance Music
Article for mixmag.net in which, with Lisa Blanning, she picked out some of dance's key women. You can read the article here.