This article looks at Amina Aaliya Beg’s show and tour 'My Mum Told Me Not To Marry An Atheist', which blends stand-up, theatre, and DJing to explore intergenerational relationships, mixed marriage, and the tensions between honesty and expectation within families. Beg uses humour, sound, and storytelling to make theatre more accessible while also extending the project into community-led DJ workshops for women of colour, framing her work as both a creative and social intervention around representation, agency, and cultural dialogue.
When UK-based DJ & founder of Ajeeb Studios Amina Aaliya Beg invited her husband’s family over to her parents’ house before they got married, she and James had already made a full Google Doc of their relationship timeline, along with a script of what to say and not to say to his parents. They were basically rehearsing how to pitch him to her Dadi and mother as the ideal suitor — a self-taught, architect-in-training — almost like Nathan Fielder’s ‘The Rehearsal’; planning out every possible conversation and timeline.
“James and I always joked about potential plot developments/inciting incidents that we found in that document,” she recalls. “We always thought that performing this play in a meta-type way would be the best way to come out to our parents on how mixed marriages can give dawah (spread Islam), changing the social and political discourse framed around Muslim representation (and that we also wanted to be together).”
This went on to become ‘My Mum Told Me Not To Marry An Atheist,’ a performance that mixes stand-up and DJing. It's an intergenerational relationship between a Dadi (grandmother) who is a radio-presenter and DJ and her granddaughter Kamal, exploring their relationship through love, marriage, and the fact that they're both intergenerational trouble-makers. “The first performance was in September 2023 at Contact Theatre in Manchester where my husband James Baker and I focused more on spoken word, projection, and architecture,” shares Amina. “The show kept changing over the past 3 years, developing as a stand-up special and then last summer we performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and we wanted to intersect all these disciplines that we love and especially my love for DJing.”
“I feel that DJing and stand-up work well in tandem. I’ve always wanted to manipulate sound in theatre and DJ decks can so often act as a character, distorting reality, truth and storytelling. I wanted to explore the lies we tell our loved ones, which Kamal does via the DJ decks as she believes Dadi won’t accept her for who she is. I’m really curious to see how sometimes our grandparents can be more accepting than our own parents, so that’s my research really for the tour.”Amina Beg
DJing, for Amina, is an art form that curates people into ease, directing the atmosphere whilst introducing people to new ideas. Some people see DJing as a ‘low art form’, and she wanted to bring it to theatre, because theatre, like art galleries, can feel inaccessible. “Maybe it’s the awkward tension of us versus them when we’re watching performers or it’s the dialogue,” she notes. “Honestly, I struggle to understand what’s happening on-stage (even though this is was my degree at uni).” Amina points how sometimes people can feel that they’re not smart enough to understand ‘it’, which is a mindset she wishes could be unlearned.
Amina wanted to make a show where aunties could bring their daughters, and vice versa. “This show is for the ladies because they’re genuinely the funniest people with sharp wit, flow and cadence,” she shares.
Alongside the tour, Amina is also leading a DJing workshop with a particularly tongue-in-cheek poster, which was inspired by an old Indian ad she saw. “Train her to be the ideal housewife,” it said, encouraging women to buy a sewing machine. Amina wanted to invert that with DJ decks with a workshop as outreach for her play so women of colour around the UK could learn the basics of DJing. “It can feel quite overwhelming and intimidating, especially since how male and white dominating the DJ scene is,” she says. “I really wanted to target older ladies who are 45+ because I feel that a lot of opportunities for learning these skills are targeted to young people, so there’s not much of a chance to pick up new skills.”
Through the workshops, Amina wants to build confidence in women and push them to be more decisive. She believes that DJing teaches you real-life lessons like staying calm under pressure, being in control of what you want to play, directing a crowd, curating an atmosphere, and making people feel at ease.
She’s also testing this idea within the South Asian community, where parties are usually tied to weddings, where people break bank or wait for someone to get married just to celebrate, especially women. Aunties have a bad rep in our culture of not having a life outside their kids, and being uptight, gossiping killjoys, which may be rooted in some truth, but is a stereotype nonetheless. This is precisely what Amina is trying to subvert.
“I want the ladies to throw their own parties essentially so they can have fun and meet their friends without the financial pressures of wedding season,” she notes. “Hopefully, this will lead to other ladies sharing this knowledge and passing on the baton so that other ladies can do the same.”
Follow Amina here.
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