#36 __ last call

When I sat down to write tonight, I started browsing through my unfinished pieces. It’s been weeks since I’ve done any dance writing and I’d totally forgotten about my most recent working draft, which I started back in January. Reading it now I can’t help but laugh at the bitter irony, the painful ignorance of the future to come.

#XX __ what it feels like to dance

Everywhere we go, there a thousand invisible, unspoken rules for how we move through and occupy space. There’s the myriad courtesies of the commute: bustling along as quickly as possible while squeezing through narrow spaces, an endless game of human dodgeball and avoiding eye contact. There’s the stolid patience of sitting through classes and meetings, marathons of still silence. The vacant discomfort of waiting rooms. Restaurants, the post office, movie theaters, and bodegas — each environment comes with its own social and physical limitations that constrain our bodies.

Following these rules doesn’t come naturally; just watch any parent of a young child struggle to explain the difference between a grocery store and the playground. Eventually, though, the lessons sink in. Once we learn to sit still and use our indoor voices, the schools take away recess and give us sign-up sheets for after-school sports. Soon, the only acceptable forms of physical expression are competitive or performative. The rest of life is for sitting down and shutting up.

This is where my urge to dance begins: I need to move freely, but our world is built to discourage that at every moment. The mere act of existence collects this energetic concoction of all the joy, frustration, rage, and love that I experience throughout each day. But these feelings don’t just live in my mind; they seep into my bones. There is only one language that can channel these emotions out of my body, and that is dance.

But breaking the bonds that the world has placed on my body takes convincing — the music has to show me the way. I need the bass to speak to my joints until my knees start to bounce, my hips sway, my head nods, and my fingers and toes have no choice but to tap along. Combine all these little movements together, and a dance begins to emerge , a full-bodied interpretation of the rhythm. The sound pours over my body like a hot shower on a cold day, and the immersion is complete. I’m ready to move.

It starts with release. Loosening up, getting sweaty, shedding the worldly anxieties that are weighing me down. Some nights, I come in with so much baggage that this is as far as I can go. Other times the music isn’t good enough to take me further, or the crowd keeps pulling me out of it before I can go deeper. But if I can at least get my heart pumping and pound some feelings out on the dance floor, I walk away feeling a little lighter and more whole than when I started…

How quaint the thought of crowded trains, restaurants, movie theaters has already become after two weeks of isolation. Those rules I complained about seem utterly trivial in comparison to the new order of social distancing. But now, the stakes are so much higher. For perhaps the first time in human history we must not dance together; to party in this moment would be sociopathic. But this moment will go on for many months, perhaps even years.

Take the CDC’s 18-month estimate: there’s not a single venue on this planet that can survive social distancing for that long. Many will close and maybe a few will find a new niche online or by re-purposing their spaces. The only certainty is that by the end of this pandemic, whatever’s left of the industry will look completely different than what we’ve known so far. There will be no going back.

Writing about the joys of the rave in the midst of quarantine feels masochistic. I have dozens of half-finished drafts left for outer ][ space, but I am not sure what future — if any — this blog has in our new world. What is dance music without the dance floor? We’ll need to find new ways to tend the flame and keep our shared love for this music going through this crisis, waiting for the day we can be reunited on the dance floor. What a day that will be.

Thank you so much for reading.

Please join me in the raveNY Slack group. It’s a place for our community to chat, share thoughts and ideas, and coordinate. We no longer have physical spaces to congregate, so we’ll have to settle for virtual.