About Us
Founded in 2019 by Renee Dumaresque and Stefana Fratila, Crip Rave emerged as the first collective of its kind, prioritizing accessibility in rave and nightlife spaces with a particular focus on Crip, Mad, Sick, Deaf, or Disabled talent and party goers.
Crip Rave operates as a Toronto-based event platform and curation/consulting hub with offerings ranging from accessible event production, community-based education through workshops and panels, and access consultation for parties, promoters and festivals realizing their own accessibility goals.
“In terms of language, we use words like Crip and Mad because they are politicized terms that have been reclaimed by a range of communities around disability, mental health, chronic pain and illness, etc. These words are often taken up as an identity but our objective is to enhance the conditions of work and play for anyone with related lived experiences, regardless of what language they use or identify with (if any).”
Renee and Stefana are Mad and Crip organizers who are passionate about electronic music and envision a world where raves are accessible to everyone.
Together, they have hosted parties and collaborated on events with DIY parties and major festivals from San Francisco (Gray Area Festival), St. John’s, Newfoundland, (YUNG DUMB, ECHO, Selenium), Montréal (Latex), Ottawa (Debaser), and Calgary (Sled Island).
They’ve also delivered workshops, spoken on panels, and consulted with electronic mainstays like MUTEK (Montréal) and Nowadays (New York). Crip Rave draws on lineages of electronic music, rave and club culture, as well as Disability Justice and Crip community wisdom throughout their work.
Stefana, Co-Founder
Stefana Fratila is a Romanian-born artist, composer and sound designer based in Toronto, Canada. She also DJs under the alias DJ Crip Time, appearing on NTS Radio (London), Rinse France (Paris), The Lot (New York), Refuge Worldwide (Berlin), Radio Nopal (CDMX), HKCR (Hong Kong), n10.as (Montréal), SutroFM (San Francisco), and Hotel Radio Paris.
She created Sononaut, 8 open-source VST plug-ins that emulate the atmospheric conditions of the planets in our solar system in collaboration with NASA scientists and Jen Kutler. She has exhibited and performed her work internationally, including at MoMA and e-flux (New York, USA), Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), MUTEK (Montréal) / MUTEK.AE (Dubai), and the International Symposium on Electronic Art (Paris, France).
Resident Advisor called her most recent album, I want to leave this Earth behind, “a spellbinding LP of sound art that delights and unnerves in equal measure” while Bandcamp Daily highlighted it as “41 minutes of space travel that perfectly capture the immense possibilities of sound.”
Renee, Co-Founder
Renee Dumaresque lives between St. John’s (Newfoundland) and Toronto and is a doctoral candidate, working psychotherapist, community activist, and rave provider practicing at the intersection of creative, critical, and chaotic thought.
They are a long-time organizer of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Toronto, as well as a Board member of the Social Justice Co-Operative of Newfoundland and Labrador. Their writing and perspectives on music, sound, queerness, disability justice, race, and colonization can be found in multiple publications and platforms including Refuge Worldwide, the Journal of Feminist Scholarship, New Sociology: Journal of Critical Praxis, and Intersectionalities: A Global Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Polity, and Practice.
Crip Rave as Critical Rave Theory and Practice
Revolution is written into the origins of electronic music. The genres, sounds, and spaces of rave, club, and electronic dance music culture have been crafted through Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous and People of Colour resistance.
Informed by these legacies, Crip Rave centres Crip, Disabled, Deaf, Mad and Sick communities within expressive and innovative electronic music spaces. Our work counters the structural barriers, industry standards, and ableism that make rave spaces inaccessible and exclusionary to diverse abilities, and which are exasperated by racism and classism.
The ‘collective’ in our name refers to the artists, collaborators, teachers, ASL interpreters, graphic designers, access support workers, and lineages of Disability Justice and Crip community wisdom that make our events possible.