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Belle Histoire

Two decades into a life spent moving, if you ask what I bring into a room, it isn't limited to showmanship. It's a deep, intuitive mastery of body control and articulation, matched with an urgency about movement that's been embedded in me since long before I had language for it.

Before movement, there was mathematics. Architecture, too. I had genuine ambitions of teaching either; structure and precision were always where my mind wanted to live. But somewhere in the early 2000s, the drive to move overtook the drive to explain how things were built. Music videos were still a real cultural force back then, well before our media diet fractured into the disjointed way we consume things now, and that was the world that pulled me in.

My actual start in dance, though, was less a decision than a shove: thrown into the deep end of the pool, on Sint Maarten, early 2000s. "Dance," even as a hobby, wasn't the easiest look for a guy to wear at the time, not with Jamaica sitting right next door, its musical influence already seeped well beyond the Caribbean Sea and merged into the region's wider lexicon and attitudes. I still love and enjoy Dancehall and Reggaeton today for what they are. I'll also say plainly that both unfortunately carry lyrics that are largely homophobic and misogynistic. Being one of the few boys who dared to dance at all, in that climate, came with few advantages at the time. Most of those advantages only become recognizable in hindsight.

One of them, unglamorous as it sounds: ratio. Boys were so outnumbered that if you showed even a bit of talent, you'd be thrust straight into the advanced classes and carried along on sheer encouragement until you caught up to where you were "supposed" to be. That ratio didn't stay behind on the island. It followed me into my university years.

Being a Dutch national, moving to the Netherlands to pursue a bachelor's degree after finishing HAVO was relatively standard procedure. Many students made that crossing with one shoe left at home, so to speak. I never packed that way. I saw it as my great escape, my chance to venture out into the wider world where I belonged, all the freedom I'd imagined finally within reach.

The program itself didn't quite live up to the fantasy I'd built around it. I went to two universities, and the ratio that shaped my island years followed me straight into the first one: my inaugural class at Fontys Dance Academy, in 2007/08, had an anomalous number of young men sign up. I didn't see out the second year there; before it closed, I'd decided to change schools and continue my studies in Rotterdam, at Codarts Dance Academy, 2009/10. It was a different animal entirely: much less homie, much less cozy, run more like an industry machine than a school. Given the notoriety that came with being a Codarts alumnus, it was an easy trade to make.

Before the close of 2010, I'd met Nanine Linning. Today she's the Artistic Leader of Scapino Ballet in Rotterdam; back then, she had exactly one year under her belt as Company Director of the city theater in Osnabrück, Germany. I joined her company as an apprentice, trading my final year of taking classes as a student for a full season's worth of real workfield and stage experience instead. I graduated in 2011, the same year the company changed host cities: most of us moved to Heidelberg with it, and I stayed an integral member of the company until 2016. Some of that archive still lives on @kye_pai, if you want to see it.

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Techno Reclamation

Long before it was a sound you needed the right posture to get past a bouncer for, techno was Black and it was American. Three teenagers from Belleville, Michigan, spliced Parliament-Funkadelic's cosmic slop together with Kraftwerk's precision, because a synthesizer, unlike a factory job, doesn't care what you look like when it hires you. Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson (the Belleville Three) built the blueprint in Detroit's Black middle class, feeding it late at night to The Electrifying Mojo's radio show, the DJ whose refusal to sort records by genre or race is half the reason Kraftwerk and Parliament ever ended up in the same mix to begin with. What came out of it was what one writer called "a deprived sound trying to get out," which is Afrofuturism doing exactly what it always does: taking the machine that was supposed to replace you and making it sing on your terms instead. And it isn't a distant cousin to what I grew up around. It's the same family. It's the current Paul Gilroy named the Black Atlantic: the same one that carried Jamaica's soundsystem culture across the sea to Sint Maarten's doorstep is the one that carried funk and soul into Detroit's basements and came back out the other side as a four-on-the-floor kick drum.

It's also traceable, almost embarrassingly precisely: a 1988 Virgin Records compilation called Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit is the reason the genre has that name at all, and it's the record that physically carried this sound across the Atlantic into England, Belgium, and Germany, handing European producers the blueprint direct from the source.

Somewhere between Detroit and the club I had to dress correctly for, that origin got quietly edited out of the story. The scholar Alexander Weheliye has documented this in detail: West Berlin had Black club culture (funk, R&B, house) running through it well before 1989, and around 1992, as the city's producers built the harder, more "metronomic" sound that would become internationally synonymous with Berlin, that scene got written out of the story. It happened alongside, not apart from, the violence people of color faced during German reunification, violence the official narrative still treats as an exception rather than as part of how the city rebuilt its own myth. Blackness stayed welcome in that myth only from a safe transatlantic distance: celebrated in Detroit's producers, absent from Berlin's own dancefloors. There's a whole movement now doing the work of putting that authorship back where it belongs: Make Techno Black Again, built around the theorist and producer DeForrest Brown Jr., is the bluntest, most literal name for it, arguing that the genres funding the modern music industry were, plainly, taken from Black people, and that fixing it takes more than a credit line.

I didn't coin "Techno Reclamation" as an academic position. I coined it standing in a Berlin queue, aware that the anonymity and clout I was chasing were built, underneath everything, on a lineage that already belonged to someone who looked like me. Anonymity and personal branding turned out to be two ends of the same rope: the more I disappeared into Berlin's version of the culture, the more I understood I was actually looking for a way back to where it started. For me, that isn't Detroit. It's Sint Maarten, and the youth there who've never been told that the music filling out a Berlin warehouse at 4am has their own grandparents' fingerprints on it. That's the branding, stripped down to its actual ambition: not "dancer who lived in Berlin," but someone carrying the reclamation home, teaching the technique with the history still attached.

That's not an argument I make from the sidelines. It's a practice I show up for. Since at least September 2025 I've been part of Das Techno Team, the Berlin collective behind Resonanz: The Movement of Sound, a dance workshop set to live electronic music. My credit on it is "Impulses," the movement layer, standing in the same production credit block as Light and Sound, because Resonanz treats the body moving through a room as its own instrument, not an accessory to the ones plugged in. What started as Berlin editions became an international premiere at Slakthuset in Stockholm, then a Copenhagen edition, with my name on the lineup poster alongside John Fick, Ritual Cycles, Eitan Shinder, and Molly Lollen; and, less formally but no less sincerely, the team's own "Head of Upper Body Operations." Techno Reclamation isn't a position I hold at a remove from the culture. It's the room I'm standing in most weekends, doing the actual work of putting the body back at the center of a sound that, for a while, tried to forget it ever had one.