In 2023 In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre announced that its traditional MayDay celebration would be “released” to the community. This wasn’t a major surprise: Heart of the Beast had taken a three-year hiatus from organizing the colorful south Minneapolis MayDay parade and subsequent festivities in Powderhorn Park.
Still, when Heart of the Beast stated that “future MayDay events or actions will be independently produced by community groups,” nobody knew exactly what that meant. Including the parks department.
“Once I saw that, my initial reaction was, ‘What’s this going to look like?’” says Liz Kraus, Powderhorn Park’s longtime recreation supervisor.
But thanks to developments already taking place, Kraus had some idea what it was going to sound like.
Kraus had some trepidation when she first got a phone call from a local DJ who wanted to set up a sound system in the park for MayDay in 2022. It was another hiatus year for Heart of the Beast, and Kraus was worried about the event becoming a free-for-all. Then she met with Dee Alexander, who plays out as D Untethered and runs a system dubbed The People’s Sound.
“I was still somewhat nervous about what the event itself was going to look like. It wasn’t anything personal. I was just like, ‘You need to keep the music family-friendly. We’re trying to keep this as calm, friendly, and safe as possible for everybody,’” she recalls. Alexander readily agreed.
Alexander had also come to the table representing some friends, the proprietors of three other sound systems. Wizard Haus, The Headspace Collective, and Technosferatu, along with The People’s Sound, would share the fee expense and space themselves out so as not to bleed into one another’s airspace.
Jump ahead to MayDay 2025, this coming Sunday. The sound system lineup will still be much the same: though Pivot will replace Technosferatu, they share personnel. And where once the music in Powderhorn Park the first Sunday of May had a happenstantial feel to it, the systems have helped remake the event.
Prior to Covid, going to Powderhorn Park on MayDay meant you were liable to hear all sorts of music. Often it was folky and acoustic, such as the music accompanying Morris dancers; Heart of the Beast convened a drum circle each year.
But the music probably wasn’t the reason you were going to MayDay. You went to be around tens of thousands of others celebrating International Workers’ Day, to see the amazing constructs of the MayDay parade (as in this video from 2017), to enjoy the weather in the park. Music was incidental to the event.
Not anymore.
“There’s a bigger focus on having music going all day,” says Ryan Ruckus, the proprietor of Wizard Haus. “I see some groups of younger people coming and hanging out at the park for the music specifically.”
Kraus agrees. “I remember standing there last year, thinking, ‘There’s just a beat to the park right now,’” she says. “When I hear the music, I don’t even think about the words to it, or anything like that. I’m just feeling like: ‘The park is vibrating.’”
From George Floyd Square to Powderhorn Park
The neighborhood had been vibrating for a while by then. All four sound systems playing at MayDay had been throwing unauthorized “renegades,” as Neil Fox of The Headspace Collective puts it, long before they got permission to play at Powderhorn Park.
But the story really begins in May 2020, when George Floyd was killed in front of Cup Foods, close to where Dee Alexander lived.
Born and raised in Ohio and in the Twin Cities since late 2017, Alexander is a former Minneapolis Public Schools special-ed teacher and a lifelong music head who took drumming classes while in high school, and inherited (and inveterately tinkered with) a home hi-fi system that had previously passed from their grandfather to their dad.
Moving to Duluth for college, Alexander began hanging with a group of house and techno DJs—including Nola Rave, the promoter of Freak of the Week: “I used to go see Nola DJ at dive bars in Superior, Wisconsin,” Alexander recalls. After relocating to Minneapolis and becoming a fixture of its underground DJ events, Dee got the bug and began to spin in 2018 as D Untethered.
Then the uprising happened.
“I don’t live too far from the George Floyd Square, so I was often there, because it was during the pandemic, and I was living alone during all that,” Alexander says. “When everything went down, I was already craving connection, just being around people. George Floyd’s murder, for me, was also a call to connect with my community.”
Alexander began to assist neighborhood activists Mari Hernandez, who painted the names of police-murder victims on the street, and Marcia Howard, a mainstay of the Square’s security staff.
Additionally, Alexander says, “I got really inspired by seeing all of these sound system pop-ups accompanied with free food—just kind of popped up naturally in the square.”
Soon, Alexander’s own speaker setup would be one of them.
“There was a moment where they were trying to include more community programming in that space,” Alexander says. “There had been some gun violence going on there, and there was a lot of time, and not enough programming to fill it in, to get people something to look forward to there—something to think about that wasn’t just the trauma and the devastation that was happening in that neighborhood.
“The experience that I was having in the Square opened me up to wanting to get into sound-system stuff,” Alexander adds. “I saw it as something that was needed, because a lot of these folks were just using Bluetooth speakers and megaphones. I thought that I could use my relationships to bridge that gap, and help them with that resource.”
In August 2020, with help from Steven Centrific of the Minneapolis techno promoters Intellephunk, Alexander borrowed a pair of QSC PA speakers to “do little dance parties in [George Floyd Square], just trying to keep a group going for a couple hours a day,” he says.
Alexander also, in turn, provided gear for other neighborhood activists: “I had a generator donated by someone in the community because they saw what I was doing,” Alexander says. “We were able to have a generator to pop up in the back of these trucks to do marches.”
Alexander’s system was initially dubbed Floydtown Sound, but was formally renamed after a few months. “It became The People’s Sound when I did a fundraiser in March of 2021,” they say. “I was able to raise around $7,000 to actually buy a PA that we could use for more frequent events.”
How does The People’s Sound actually sound? Frankly, amazing. Last fall, while dancing directly in front of one of Alexander’s speakers halfway to the back of the dance space at the Red Sea Restaurant & Bar, in Cedar-Riverside (a prime spot for the local DJ scene of late), I was knocked out by the music’s sheer clarity. (In addition to playing around town and regularly renting out The People’s Sound for parties, Alexander is also a co-promoter of Decadance, a Saturday monthly at the Uptown VFW.)
Alexander was hardly alone in the dance scene in attending to the community’s needs during the uprising. In fact, several promoters and DJs, accustomed to hauling sound systems around, helped make supply runs and pick up donated items.
“Our friends from the techno scene—on Facebook, people would just buy stuff and be like, ‘I want to donate this to the neighborhood where the uprising was,’” Miss Elaine Eos of The Headspace Collective says. “They would drive through and drop off stuff. We had tables, and then other people would come through and pick it up—everything from car seats and diapers to pantry foods and fresh foods. It was amazing watching that happen.”
Eos and Fox of The Headspace Collective, who also co-promote the monthly party Housewerk, first met Alexander when he was manning a table on Chicago and Lake with Ryan Ruckus of Wizard Haus.
“We did a couple of donation drives during the uprising,” Ruckus recalls. “We set up outdoors here in Southside and collected food and supplies.”
Ruckus had been the proprietor of an informal venue, gone into hibernation alongside Covid, also called Wizard Haus; he describes it as “a punk house with techno music.” Ruckus also provided music at events for Open Streets Minneapolis and Midtown Greenway, and he worked with Alexander on Prairie Fyre, a music and arts festival in rural Minnesota which went for two years. (Though he operates a sound system, Ruckus himself doesn’t DJ.)
Eos and Fox had been doing renegade outdoor parties since 2017, when they set up near their home on, of course, MayDay, in “a vacant lot between Lake Street and 31st on Bloomington that is now a clinic,” Eos recalls.
The couple house their sound system under a geodesic tent. “We set the dome up there next to the parade route,” Eos says. “A lot of MayDay is waiting for the parade, so we wanted to be the entertainment waiting for the parade. We turned the music off when the parade was there—then [afterward], we turned it back on and kept going.”
The Rise and Fall—and Rise Again—of MayDay
Beginning in 1975, Southside Minneapolis’s MayDay events were small at first. Liz Kraus, who has worked for Powderhorn Park for 11 years, regularly hears MayDay memories from committee members along the lines of: “I was there when it was just a couple people walking down Bloomington Avenue together.”
“MayDay is one of those Southside things that is hard to explain to people who don’t live down here,” says Ryan Ruckus, a Chicago native who moved to south Minneapolis in the mid-2010s. “It’s a celebration of spring, it’s a celebration of workers’ rights. [For] all the blue-collar type folks who live down here, it’s historically a labor holiday, so it ties into the unions and the fight for workers’ rights. It’s sort of a multi-pronged day of celebration.”
MayDay ballooned in size over the decades; by 2019, MSP Mag estimated its attendance at around 60,000 annually. But that same year, Heart of the Beast had to throw a last-minute fundraiser to get MayDay off the ground. They scaled down drastically in 2020 to regroup, but that hiatus was exacerbated by Covid, as well as wariness about visiting a neighborhood that was being mythologized as still aflame. The crowd size plummeted: Kraus estimates that MayDay 2022 drew fewer than 2,000 people.
That didn’t stop Alexander from setting up the newly minted People’s Sound at Powderhorn Park for MayDay 2021. Neither did the lack of a permit. “The first year was renegade: ‘I’m just gonna pop up, what are they gonna say?’,” Alexander recalls. “I knew that MayDay at the time was kind of null—there wasn’t really anything going on that day. We went for about four or five hours that day.”
When Alexander approached the parks department about a permit for 2022, Kraus was not aware that he’d done an unlicensed pop-up in the park a year before. But as she notes, that sort of thing is fairly commonplace. “This park is 65 acres,” she says with a laugh. “Sometimes I’ll come to work on Monday or Tuesday, and people will ask me, ‘Who was that band on Saturday?’”—when no bands had been scheduled.
Initially, the park wanted to bill each of the four sound systems individually. “That put us around 400 or 500 bucks just for a day’s worth of music,” Alexander says. Instead, the systems and the city negotiated a single permit price, split four ways, which they went with from 2022 to 2024.
“This year is a little different, because there’s more groups that are involved with the production part of it now,” Alexander says. “We’ve since consolidated.”
Specifically, according to the FAQ of the MayDay MPLS web page, this year’s Tree of Life Ceremony, as well as “essential infrastructure for the Parade and Events at the Park, such as Sequeerity, Porta-potties, Permits, Traffic Control, and the creation of this website,” are funded by the Semilla Center for Healing and the Arts with a grant made through Lake Street Lift.
Semilla Center’s taking the reins on the organizational end of this year’s MayDay activities means everyone else can focus on their craft. “This is the first year” since Heart of the Beast let the reins go, Kraus notes, “that an organization has stepped forward and said, ‘We’ll put our name on a permit.’”
According to Alexander, “It’s taking a lot of weight off of me. I’ve applied for grant funding through Lake Street Lift to increase the level of production that we can do with our side of the thing. There’s paying artists, a higher-fidelity sound system, the generator, all those extra things that we’d like to try to do this year.”
They have good reason to try. There’s been a steady increase in MayDay attendance at Powderhorn Park since its hiatus. Following the under-2,000 attendance at MayDay 2022, Kraus estimates that MayDay 2023 drew around 5,000; and that MayDay 2024 drew between 8,000 and 10,000.
She notes that the demographic is changing, and that the systems are helping to change them.
“Mostly, I’d say that people who attend this event are between 20 and 40 years of age,” Kraus says. Of the sound systems’ role, she says: “I think it sets the tone. It set the vibe.”
Ruckus says: “There used to be a lot of families, a lot of kids lined up to watch the parade. There’s still families and children doing their thing—I hesitate to say it’s less family-friendly, because it still is that. But it seems like a lot more younger people are out and about.”
For the proprietor of The People’s Sound, one thing hasn’t changed.
“When people show up there on that Sunday, I’m trying to provide an environment where people can spend time together and have six hours of just freedom from concern from what their workday is going to be like on Monday, or concern of the things that are troubling us right now,” Alexander says.
“We all put a lot of thought and intention into that day,” they add. “I think having the music there increases the overall experience—it gives people something to engage in that’s greater than themselves.”
MayDay in the Park 2025
With: The Headspace Collective, The People’s Sound, Pivot, and Wizard Haus sound systems (see individual system line-ups here)
Where: Powderhorn Park, 3400 15th Ave. S., Minneapolis
When: 11 a.m. Sunday, May 4
Tickets: Free; find more info here
