“I didn’t even imagine that I would keep DJing pregnant, cos I just didn’t think anybody wanted to see that,” says Anna Lunoe, down the phone from Los Angeles.
The Australian-born, US-based DJ has just stopped working for the year, but not before capping off a tour with a set at California’s Hard Summer festival, which saw her climbing the decks while eight months pregnant.
“It was something that I’d picked up in culture – a general understanding that people didn’t want to see pregnant women being anything but like, on the couch and in kitchens,” Lunoe says.
An alumnus of Sydney’s FBI Radio and the first woman to mix for Ministry of Sound Australia, Lunoe moved from Sydney to LA in 2012 to build her career. And it’s been quite a career: she has collaborated with artists like Flume and Touch Sensitive, toured with artists like MIA, The Weeknd and Diplo, played festivals from Lollapalooza to Coachella, and shared a stage with Skrillex.
Yet she never envisioned her career would take this particular turn.
“The message that my teenage brain got [was] like, oh when you’re pregnant, life’s over. That was the message that I felt. And that goes for a lot of things about being a woman,” she says. “Joking about women being unattractive and unworthy when they get pregnant or older is something that we all experience, all the time. And obviously that’s crazy.”
Visibly pregnant performers are rare enough that they still take audiences somewhat by surprise. Rapper MIA astounded Grammy audiences in 2009 by performing on her due date. When Beyoncé took the stage at the Grammys in February, shortly after announcing via Instagram that she was pregnant with twins, the world responded with rapture. (Soon afterwards, on the advice of her doctors, she cancelled her April Coachella performance.) And in the world of film and TV, pregnant stars are regularly seen as problems to be worked around rather than with, although there are some exceptions.
“I’ve been DJing forever, it’s just my muscle memory – this is just what I do,” Lunoe says. “Why should I not be able to perform or do my job because it’s ‘scary’ for people to see me in that state?”
“As I’ve gotten older, and have become an old pregnant lady, I’ve come to realise that it’s all in your head – what you’re willing to accept and what you want to be. So I’m not going to give anybody that control over me.”
Every woman’s experience of pregnancy is different, but Lunoe is adamant that staying active – and continuing to work – helped her through the rough bits.
“I found if I had morning sickness or any kind of nausea, DJing actually made me feel a lot better,” she says. “It just got me out of my head and got my body moving. Dancing makes you happy. It made me happy and it would make my body feel a lot better afterwards. So it was actually a really great tool for coping with the pregnancy symptoms.”
“I spoke to everybody and asked about things that I should and shouldn’t do, and I was cautious not to do any high impact jumping around. But at the same time, women run the whole way through their pregnancy which is much more high impact than doing a DJ set for an hour.”
While she’s taking a hiatus for the next few months to focus on “getting this baby out in a happy, healthy way and making my house baby-friendly”, Lunoe will continue to host her radio show, Hyperhouse, throughout the remainder of her pregnancy. And while she’s adamant she won’t stop DJing, she’s comfortably noncommittal about the next stage of her career.
“Honestly, this is the most interesting change of my whole adult life so far,” she says. “Probably since I moved to America my life hasn’t been this in question. I really don’t know what’s next.”
