World-renowned singer, composer, musician, curator, activist, producer, and storyteller Toshi Reagon was Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts 2021–2022 Artist in Residence.
During her residency at Wesleyan, Reagon focused on research and development for the new performance piece "You’re Having Too Much Fun So We’re Gonna Have to Kill You" (formerly the "Disco Project"), which traces disco’s journey from subversive underground communities to international fame and violent repression. 1960s and '70s discotheques were vibrant, safe spaces for Black and Queer joy and expression, and became spaces for revolution, activism, and protest. Reagon interrogates the intense anti-Black and homophobic backlash towards disco, from the "disco sucks" campaign to the disco demolition night in Chicago in 1979. She also explores how disco was appropriated by the global music economy, and how its demise intersected with the AIDS crisis. In telling the story of disco, Reagon ultimately examines how Black and Queer joy, expression, and movement in the United States is consistently and violently suppressed by institutional powers.
Reagon’s artist residency at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts was supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Throughout the year, Reagon was in conversation with Wesleyan faculty, students, and community members through meetings, workshops, public work-in-progress showings and performances, and classroom settings, both around "You’re Having Too Much Fun So We’re Gonna Have to Kill You" and her currently-touring work, an opera adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s "Parable of the Sower."
In the spring of 2022, Reagon engaged with students in several classes, including “Dance as Activism” taught by Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance and African American Studies Joya Powell; and “Queering the Dancing Body” taught by Professor and Chair of the Dance Department, and Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Hari Krishnan. Reagon spent time during the summer of 2022 developing a work-in-progress showing of "You’re Having Too Much Fun So We’re Gonna Have to Kill You" that was one of the highlights of the 2022–2023 Performing Arts Series at the Center for the Arts.
About Toshi Reagon
Toshi Reagon is a powerhouse singer, composer, and bandleader whose genre-defying sound blends folk, blues, gospel, rock, and R&B with fearless social vision. Raised in a musical activist family—her mother, Bernice Johnson Reagon, founded Sweet Honey in the Rock—she has co-created operas, collaborated with artists like Lenny Kravitz and Meshell Ndegeocello, and led her band BIGLovely since 1996. Her music has been featured by Dorrance Dance and in The Gospel of James Baldwin, and she’s received numerous honors, including a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship, the Herb Alpert Award, and a Civic Practice Partnership residency at The Met.
Read “An Antidote to a Season of Political Despair” in Harper's Bazaar.
