Juha
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Juha is also a common Finnish name.
Juha is the stage name of the artist and musician Collin Clay (born Collin Clay Chace, March 16, 1974), and formerly the name of the performance duo he founded with Ghalib El-Khalidi.
Taking his name from a character in Arabic folktales, Juha generally performs in the "Gothic Soul" musical style - a fusing of soul, hip hop, and gothic genres.
Juha is of mixed white and Melungeon ancestry. He was born in Rhode Island to a lawyer and a French teacher. He is also an outspoken vegan and anarchist.
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[edit] Early career
Juha began his career in 1993 as a performance artist in the Providence, Rhode Island Spoken Word poetry circuit. The deaths of close friends led him to the AIDS activists' group, ACT UP and, fueled by their radical tactics, he began a series of solo performances that addressed the AIDS crisis. The first was If You Cough In A Metal Box, in which he played characters that included drag queens, neo-nazis, and lab monkeys. At this time he also began publishing the zine QuART, which circulated in the queer punk underground.
Rock N Roll (We Vanish Quick), his second solo show, the love story of two young punks, debuted in the Spring of 1995 at Hampshire College. This was followed in the Autumn by I, Dolores, Lost Member of the Jackson Family – “the shocking story of Michael & Janet’s long-lost HIV+ sister.” He received a Threshold Grant through Hampshire in 1996 for these works, followed by a Fellowship from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts in 1998.
In 1999, after working in the office of the Carriage House, an after-school Hip Hop program in Providence, he and artist Ghalib El-Khalidi moved to San Francisco and began performing under the Juha moniker. Faggoty Ann & Andy, the love story of two Palestinian boys growing up under Israeli occupation, was developed through a residency at the Jon Sims Center for the Performing Arts, and the final version of the piece was presented as part of the Queer Arts Festival.
[edit] Music Career
In 2001, having relocated to Maui, the pair toured the East Coast with “an alien medicine show” called Orange, a hip-hop inflected mix of sparse beats and sampling, emphasizing social and political issues.
Following Orange, Juha began work on the album Polari, for hardcore punk independent record label Agitprop! Records. Adam Capriccio co-produced the album with Juha, with emcee Demune assisting in the mixing process. Clay took his hip hop name, Jojoboy, from a phone sex ad. In 2002, the pair toured the West Coast. While on tour, the Polari album was released, featuring songs about the occupations of Hawai'i and Palestine, hip hop's fear of queer men, and hunting Ted Nugent for barbecue, among other subjects.
In 2003, mixing the music from Polari with war commentary, the pair toured with Eleuthrophobia (the title being a pseudomedical diagnosis for “the fear of freedom”) on the East Coast, sharing bills with Nomy Lamm, Ricanstruction, Myles of Destruction, and Ninja Death Squad. The tour then moved to Europe, as part of Queeruption at the Kopi squat in Berlin. Juha then became Clay's solo moniker, as El-Khalidi left to concentrate on other ventures.
Juha's forthcoming album has been announced as The Grooms Of God, produced by Juha and The Mole.
