On Going Out Dancing

It’s taken me nine months to admit it, but I miss going out dancing.

After the initial shock and disorientation accompanying the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic back in the spring of 2020, I gradually found some semblance of a foothold on my daily life, enacting what would become new routines and acknowledging the unfamiliar reflexes emerging from my adjusting mind and body. The home-bound and isolated nature of quarantining suited me surprisingly well, resonating with the introversion that makes up a fair amount of my personality. I should state here that I have the good fortune of living through this ordeal with a loving partner as well as my child, which is incredibly beneficial to both my emotional and mental health, and I’m very much aware that it’s unfortunately not a luxury shared by all.

Already prone to intellectually mediating my experiences of the world, the newly extensive use of interfaced communications for both work and play has me even more of a floating head — a diffuse tangle of connecting thoughts, impulses, and unresolved cul-de-sacs; an autarkic thinking island seemingly untethered, the rest of my body its colony, exploited for its supplies of sugar and oxygen. Free time spent outdoors — as opposed to pragmatic time outdoors spent accomplishing specific tasks as quickly and efficiently as possible — occasionally pulls me into my body again, but cooking and eating have most reliably pushed my mind back down to mingle with warm viscera these past nine months, intertwining it a few moments at a time with all the other sensing organs marbling my being.

I woke up missing the feeling of going out dancing.

Dancing lets my body speak to me. Dancing has my heart pounding where my neck meets the hinges of my jaw, where the insides of my thighs fold, where the skin on the sides of my skull is thinnest, where the threads at the base of my thumbs run through to my arm pits. Dancing has hot breath pushing outwards on my sternum, spreading my ribs apart, pulling on my stomach, billowing in my sinuses, rushing through my nostrils and the crook deep inside my ears, sweeping the back of my eyes. Dancing has muscles drawing with my bones, folding, rolling, and extending them, throwing, catching, and embracing, contracting and releasing, tracing arcs and angles. Dancing pulls me together, a tensile moment where every single part of me — flesh, sinew, bone, breath, thought, emotion, affect — pushes and pulls on every other part at once, a cat’s cradle seesaw, a swaying suspended bridge, a pulsing bucky ball.

The early pandemic bubble of socially-distanced live-streamed performances and gatherings had an earnest, exploratory air about it that seemed like the actualisation of a millennial cyber-punk speculative utopia. Being a musician, a large part of my pre-COVID-19 raving was motivated by the aesthetic pleasure I derived from the music to be heard. That satisfied my mind. Dancing satisfied my body. With tele-technology bringing the dance music to me — complete with real-time visual and textual feedback — surely both yearnings would be satisfied. That bubble has since silently burst. Like countless, nameless other novelties of our era, this one wore off and grew stale for all the disruptive potential it supposedly held. Despite our ardour, we didn’t work up enough nerve to truly abandon ourselves in our rooms to flanged, atomized music coming through headphones, or tinny laptop speakers, or even hi-fi speakers, in front of a matrix of other people in other places, all trapped behind a small pane of glass, self-consciously moving their limbs to the click of a barely audible pulse.

I miss all three parts of going out dancing.

Raving requires that I surrender a part of myself over to certain contingencies. I can usually form an image in my mind about how good the music will be, how the sound will feel, how many people will be there, how the space and its surrounding area will influence the proceedings, but I can never be fully certain of anything because each of these factors — variable in and of themselves — acts on every other factor as well. As such, the rave truly is a complex living organism, tying together frequencies, bodies, pressure systems, secretions, intelligence, chemicals, trajectories, impulses, breath, blood, emotions, energy. Raving requires that I surrender my mind to my body, and my body to a larger body; that I take, share and give space and energy; that I breathe air soaked through with moods and emotions; that I both react to a pulse and influence it.

Apart from nostalgia, is anything left of raving?

It’s hard to know whether we’ll be able to resume going out dancing any time soon, at least the way we used to. The world we inhabit is increasingly hostile towards its human-animal population — through much of our own doing — and contending with life-threatening epidemics and extreme climatic conditions will become an integral part of our daily lives. Unsanctioned gatherings and illegal raves are the flip-side of our physically-distanced present and future. Enacting the rebellious, anti-establishment ethos of raving and giving into collective abandon like we did “back in the day” now constitute reckless and life-threatening capitulations to biological, proprioceptive and relational nostalgia — my body going out dancing puts other bodies at risk. However immediately satisfying these clandestine events might prove, there is no future for a sick, ravaged rave.

Am I doomed to dancing in my bubble, physically apart from others? Although I am loathe to admit it, part of me knows this is a distinct possibility. It feels like the pandemic has crumbled the rave into a million discrete particles, with nothing holding all the isolated fragments together, with nothing gelling. If I can bring myself to acknowledge the porousness and plasticity of the rave’s membrane, and how the outside world is constantly within it, moving through it, and acting on it, I can imagine the rave taking on forms that are not immediately recognizable. If I can transcend my initial misgivings and inhibitions, I can generate energy where there is distance. If I reinsert myself as an active agent inside the larger body, there is a chance of it pulling its estranged limbs, organs, emotions, ideas and impulses together again into an unfamiliar assemblage of multiplying technologies, bodies, realms and potentials.

To go out dancing now has a finite ring to it, the death knell for a way of doing things that belongs to the past. What we’re looking at now is the milky white, paper thin skin the rave is freeing itself from. We can hold this delicate husk in our palms and wonder at its beauty, but the rave is changing and implores us to go on dancing.