When Anna Knaup got serious about the emerging dance industry in the mid-1990s, the DJ market was a mess. Not to mention: chaos.
As a lover of the better dance parties, Knaup wanted to create order and in 1996 she stood at the cradle of the first Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE)† With the initially small grant for dance professionals who came to exchange ideas in Amsterdam, she set something big in motion. Her ADE grew into the largest dance event in the world.
For her efforts with the organization in those pioneering years, Knaup will receive a Gouden Harp on Monday, the prestigious Dutch music prize that, according to the organization, is reserved for people who ‘have made a special contribution to Dutch light music’ – the band Van Dik Hout, radio maker Frits Spits and dance entrepreneur Duncan Stutterheim preceded her over the past decade.
The collecting society Buma Culture, who was also one of the founders of the ADE, believes that Knaup has been crucial for the professionalization of dance in the Netherlands. ‘Knaup was way ahead of its time in 1996’, said Buma director Frank Helmink, when the award of the Golden Harp was announced last week. ‘She created ADE with virtually nothing. To this day dance is the Netherlands’ most successful musical export product and Knaup undoubtedly plays an important part in this.’
Friendship with DJ Derrick May
Anna Knaup – who likes to go through life ageless in the ever-rejuvenating dance world – was born in Amsterdam and trained as a beautician. At the end of the eighties she left for Spain to work in the hospitality industry. In the tourist resorts of Gran Canaria and Lloret de Mar, she first mastered the prop trade – the people who try to lure wandering visitors into a cafe or restaurant – before ending up behind the bar. She fell for the burgeoning electronic dance music of the time, which did so well on the beaches.
When she returned to the Netherlands in 1991, she kept her eye on house and techno: if a nice party was organized somewhere, Knaup would stand in line. At one of those house parties, in the Tumult youth center in Abcoude, she walked the influential American DJ Derrick May against the body. They became friends and Knaup arranged a room for the DJ, who wanted to live in the Netherlands for a while.
Knaup discovered that the DJ industry was a cowboy market. Professional record players and producers were hardly represented by agencies or record labels. Bad contracts were signed with party organizers, agreements were often not kept and DJs had to see for themselves how to arrange their affairs. ‘I saw that things often went wrong with bookings from DJs and I thought it would be nice to do something with this’, Knaup once told the dance magazine party scene†
Marketplace for DJs, club owners and promoters
Knaup set to work with a fax and a telephone: she brought international DJs to the Netherlands and arranged shows in, for example, the Amsterdam club Roxy. She started her company Anna Agency in 1995; one of the first global DJ agencies and still the driving force behind major DJs, from its first client DJ Jean to later Hardwell and Afrojack.
Around the same time, Knaup started working for the Conamus Foundation, the predecessor of Buma Cultuur. At small foreign conferences, the name of the Netherlands was increasingly used as a foreland: after all, dance flourished here so impetuously. Conamus and Knaup therefore decided to set up a fair in the Netherlands and to take dance seriously. For example, in 1996 a first, two-day symposium was organized in a hotel on the Vijzelgracht. For about three hundred people and as a kind of marketplace for DJs, club owners and promoters.
After that, the ADE grew every year and developed into a colossal, five-day event that annually attracts more than a quarter of a million visitors. Because in addition to an oversized conference with thousands of DJs and professionals, hundreds of parties are now being organized around the ADE, for an international audience.
Thanks in part to the ADE and the increasingly professional environment in which DJs and producers could work here, the Netherlands became a shining example for dance worldwide. For her role in that emancipation, Knaup is now rewarded with the distinguished music prize, which she receives from Hardwell: the DJ she has represented with her agency for years.
3 x Anna Knaup
The ADE, conceived and organized by Anna Knaup, first took place in 1996 in an Amsterdam hotel. The first ADE was a kind of Buchmesse for DJs, and a place to make contacts with labels, clubs and party organizers.
After the success of the first edition, Knaup expanded the event. Around the conference in 1997, about thirty performances were already held in clubs from Paradiso to Escape and the Melkweg. Knaup left the organization in 2000.
In addition to her work during the early years of the ADE, Knaup started her Anna Agency, one of the first DJ agencies in the world. She represents many generations of DJs, including her first client DJ Jean.