Kitty McKay

Surface Area has commissioned North-East based DJ Kitty to warm up our DeafRave on Saturday 8th March 2025.

Their DJ sets are kaleidoscopic collages: sometimes jarring, often chaotic, always relentlessly fun!

Click to book tickets to experience Kitty’s set

To learn more, we asked Kitty about their practice and process.

How does your creative practice engage with adaptation? 

As a disabled artist, I’m interested in exploring ‘the long way round’: the alternative and adapted pathways disabled folk embark on and the new encounters and experiences we may have along the way. For example, my creative practice considers the ways public space is constructed to facilitate and encourage specific normative encounters and experiences. My work focuses on moments when disabled (and queer) bodies and minds disrupt these expectations and produce alternative, adapted ways of being. I often attend to these ideas through sculpture, moving-image and sound. Similarly, I like to ensure my DJ sets are disruptive, with shifting tempos and weird frequencies creating a warped sense of space and time.

This is not to glamourise or romanticise the extra time and energy disabled people have to sacrifice when navigating ableist structures – obviously, disabled people are often still forced to adhere to normative (capitalist) clock time; failing to align often results in alienation, exhaustion, poverty and further disablement. But what can be learned from disabled people’s experiences of the long way round, what might we see, feel, hear, smell, taste, think or learn about, and what role might this play in reimagining alternative, adapted futures?

What’s one tool or method that has transformed the way you work?

When I DJ, I struggle to see the decks. The buttons, wheels and knobs are all just a glowing blur. When I play, I rely on a kind of muscle memory; an internalised sense of where things are and how they connect up. Like touch typing, I can play without looking. I can beat match by ear.

Growing up visually impaired, I was told by a consultant at the eye hospital that it would generally take me twice as long to complete a task than a fully-sighted person. When you’re DJing, you don’t always have time to spare. I allot extra time before sets, practicing and memorising my playlists so I know what is where, saving me time having to scan the tiny filenames on the even tinier CDJ screen on the night.

If, for whatever reason, the set up is not one I’m used to (different CDJs or a different mixer etc, even sometimes when they’re on a weird angle) I definitely struggle, and even panic! I guess this makes me realise my approach to adaptation can only go so far. Despite this way of DJing being an adapted and inventive tool or method for transforming how I play, I still require a lot of time (usually unpaid!) and mental energy to prepare properly. It does mean though, if there ever was a blindfolded DJ competition, I would probably excel…

Can you share a moment when access and creativity came together in an unexpected way?

It’s not necessarily in an unexpected way, but more useful, generous and empowering. Being a regular for Bend&Shake’s queer party, run by DJ Awkward Black Girl AKA Tel Herbet, has been a refreshing experience in terms of creativity and accessibility coming together. Bend&Shake is a multi-genre queer party run by women & non-binary people of colour, providing a safer space for women, trans people, QIPOC and asylum seekers.

Tel goes out of her way to create safe and accessible environments for all of her DJs as well as marginalised partygoers. I remember the first time I played a gig for her, she let me drop into the venue before the event to practice on the decks meaning I had the opportunity to acclimatise to a new DJ setup. No matter where the party is, she has no reservations making sure venue staff adjust the DJ booth to fit her DJs’ access needs, or no hesitation when it comes to enforcing the safer spaces policy. Tel’s events are creative, accessible and inclusive, but more than anything, they prioritise the needs of the marginalised folk she promotes and programmes for.