With huge headphones propped over her white hair, Polish DJ and activist Wirginia Szmyt, 85, grooves alongside a drag queen on a float at the Warsaw Pride parade.
DJ Wika, as she is known, is a young-at-heart great-grandmother determined to break down stereotypes.
“Old age is not a disease,” she said, each wrist adorned with a stack of bracelets as colorful as her personality.
Photo: AFP
“This does not mean you have to be a plant and look out the window,” she said.
Through her performances, Wika shows her staunch support for seniors and advocates for gender equality, LGBTQ rights and a more open-minded and accepting Poland.
“I am for unity, for equality, for love, for tolerance, for openness,” she said ahead of her Pride performance in June. “All this allows a person to live joyfully.”
Photo: AFP
After retiring from a career in youth rehabilitation at a correctional facility, Wika began organizing events for senior citizens, designed to “help them adjust to the 21st century.”
What began as a series of educational events, including meetings with faith leaders and politicians, went on to include parties, music, trips to the seaside and celebrations.
“In our country there was no tradition of offering something to elderly people,” she said. “The senior was simply the person who took care of the family.”
Her seniors’ parades, modeled after LGBTQ Pride parades, began in 2013, with the very first one drawing 14,000 participants in Poland’s capital.
“I thought to myself that since there is such a perception of senior citizens — that they are bothersome, just getting in the way, old — then we should make a parade, to show how beautiful they are,” Wika said.
Every year since, similar seniors’ parades have been held in several Polish cities, and DJ Wika’s 26-year-long career in music continues to flourish.
“If we want to fight for our rights, we have to show up,” she said.
DJ Wika has performed at Pride parades, women’s rights festivals and celebrations in cities such as Nice, Frankfurt and Helsinki, but one of her regular gigs is a dance night for seniors at Warsaw’s Mlociny shopping mall.
It is here, amid music that ranges from Latin hits to Eurovision contenders and her country’s own 1980s “disco polo,” that Wika’s vibrant audience comes together for a night of dancing and fun.
“Music fills me with life,” said Wika, adding that her goal is “to bring people together.”
She has built up a loyal following.
Maria Michalak, a nurse in her 60s, made an hour-long metro commute across Warsaw with her husband to attend the Mlociny mall dance.
“Compared to other such events for seniors, this is the best,” she said. “Maybe they should happen even more often.”
Andrzej Jan Kuspik, a 73-year-old pensioner, attends DJ Wika’s sets every month that he can.
“She does this for us,” he said, adding that he was so thankful that he bought Wika flowers for International Women’s Day.
Although her gigs mean regular travel across Poland and abroad, Wika does not plan on stopping anytime soon.
“Every one of us has an inner child,” she said. “If this child wakes up then we can feel younger.”
Shamans in Peru on Monday gathered for an annual New Year’s ritual where they made predictions for the year to come, including illness for US President Donald Trump and the downfall of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. “The United States should prepare itself because Donald Trump will fall seriously ill,” Juan de Dios Garcia proclaimed as he gathered with other shamans on a beach in southern Lima, dressed in traditional Andean ponchos and headdresses, and sprinkling flowers on the sand. The shamans carried large posters of world leaders, over which they crossed swords and burned incense, some of which they stomped on. In this
Indonesia yesterday began enforcing its newly ratified penal code, replacing a Dutch-era criminal law that had governed the country for more than 80 years and marking a major shift in its legal landscape. Since proclaiming independence in 1945, the Southeast Asian country had continued to operate under a colonial framework widely criticized as outdated and misaligned with Indonesia’s social values. Efforts to revise the code stalled for decades as lawmakers debated how to balance human rights, religious norms and local traditions in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. The 345-page Indonesian Penal Code, known as the KUHP, was passed in 2022. It
Near the entrance to the Panama Canal, a monument to China’s contributions to the interoceanic waterway was torn down on Saturday night by order of local authorities. The move comes as US President Donald Trump has made threats in the past few months to retake control of the canal, claiming Beijing has too much influence in its operations. In a surprising move that has been criticized by leaders in Panama and China, the mayor’s office of the locality of Arraijan ordered the demolition of the monument built in 2004 to symbolize friendship between the countries. The mayor’s office said in
‘TRUMP’S LONG GAME’: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said that while fraud was a serious issue, the US president was politicizing it to defund programs for Minnesotans US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday said it was auditing immigration cases involving US citizens of Somalian origin to detect fraud that could lead to denaturalization, or revocation of citizenship, while also announcing a freeze of childcare funds to Minnesota and demanding an audit of some daycare centers. “Under US law, if an individual procures citizenship on a fraudulent basis, that is grounds for denaturalization,” US Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. Denaturalization cases are rare and can take years. About 11 cases were pursued per year between 1990 and 2017, the Immigrant Legal Resource
RSS