Strictly Silk Is Back: Presenting Strictly Silk At Home

Our last Strictly Silk event was the Strictly Silk Amsterdam Edition, in February of 2020. Our Njeri and Akati, alongside our SS day ones Coco Em and Miss Ray, went for our first international edition, which was held in collaboration with our partners the Prince Claus Fund, and their friends Mama Cash! This was just before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has ravaged the world in ways that have affected us all. 

The policies, laws and regulations around social distancing have been essential to reducing the spread of the novel coronavirus, but they completely shut down crowd events, and Strictly Silk was one of many. We had so many hopes about having the lovely Amsterdam crew we had met come through to complete our exchange for a stupendous June edition, but all of that had to be put aside. Since then, we’ve been thinking about the ways we can remain in contact with the Strictly Silk community. Just because we cannot dance together under the stars, over drinks and laughter, does not mean that we cannot continue to listen to good music, stay in touch with each other, and continue to have rich, wonderful conversations. 

We have thus come up with a digital program for this interim time (which may continue even after our physical gatherings resume, who knows?), and we have named it ‘Strictly Silk At Home’. This, just like all our Strictly Silk events, has been designed exclusively for our diverse community of women and nonbinary folk of all ages, orientations, religions, nationalities, and more. For a start, we will most definitely continue to present amazing DJ mixes and music performances! We will also host conversations among cool people in our shared spaces, about a large number of relevant, topical issues. We’ll have some workshops and gatherings, run by experts in different fields who have cool things to share with folks who are excited to learn, like DJing, music production and more! We will invite several of our Strictly Silk community members to take over our social media accounts, so that we can get a glimpse of the ways they think and live. We will also be having many conversations about what we can do to make Strictly Silk better, so that we are ready for the eventual return to physical gatherings.

We’re really excited to try out this new way of coming together, and are looking forward to the day when we can finally announce that our physical gatherings are back—but until then, to our wonderful community of women and non binary folk who we have missed so, so very much—welcome to Strictly Silk At Home!