#4 __ crowd dynamics

Superorganisms have always been a big fascination for me. There’s something enchanting about a creature that can’t be understood in isolation. You take an ant away from its colony, and most of what makes it an ant is gone — it’s just a lonely, shitty bug. Put enough ants together and suddenly there’s all these layers of emergent behavior, far more complex than what you can find in much larger animals.

Crowds maybe aren’t as complex as bees or termites, but when you bring a group of people onto a dance floor, larger patterns emerge. There are consistent qualities you can get an immediate intuition for. You can feel a kind of viscosity when you wind your way through — an inexperienced or drunk crowd will be stiff, unaware of your presence, hard to navigate. A seasoned crowd is easy to flow through, even when densely packed.

At any party, I make it a point to surf the crowd a few times throughout the night and get a sense for where the vibe is at, especially when I find myself dissatisfied with my current neighbors on the dance floor. It’s fun just to weave between people, keeping the beat, searching for smiles, checking out who’s around, hunting for a good spot.

Picking the right spot in the crowd can be its own art. There’s a kind of terrain to each party — where are the best dancers? The seasoned regulars standing back and observing everything? The people looking for interaction? Folks who want to be in their own space? Each group is its own little biome in this ephemeral dance planet. Your neighbors on the dance floor can color the whole party experience, even if you don’t as much glance at them for hours.

Towards the back, in the nooks and crannies, you’ll usually see the couples grinding or otherwise locked together. The front, towards the DJ, can either be a stable place or constant chaos, depending on the venue — the diehard supporters will be up there, and if the sound and light are good, a steady rotation of the most exuberant dancers.

With highly engaged crowds and intense music, there’s a kind of energy requirement if you want to stay near the DJ or in the spots with the best sound. You have to keep moving, justifying your position. If you slow down or lose pace, someone else that’s more into it will eventually jump in. With more melodic genres, a natural equilibrium tends to develop; there’s a scattered formation where everyone is on their own, grooving back and forth; it’s like being underwater, watching seaweed cast about by the motions of the water, but with a faster rhythm. It’s beautifully organic.

More social crowds — especially with house — form lots of dance circles, heralded by unified hoops and hollers. This creates a tumultuous dance floor, difficult to navigate but full of spectacle. The DJ can almost becomes part of the background. This, however, has the unfortunate side effect of stopping people from dancing. One of the virtues of techno is its egalitarianism — every single person is meant to dance with equal right to their space on the floor.

Yet, each crowd is unique to that night, a custom fabrication of the local resources — the music, venue, lights, staff, and countless other little ingredients tossed into this soup of human beings.

I thought about this a lot while at Nowadays last Friday. Aurora Hala was fabulous, Rrose played some cool stuff (if mixed a bit roughly), the new lights on the dance floor are quite fun (if a bit haphazard). But once again, the crowd was the missing element in this experience. You can take the same set of people and get different results from party to party, and I think there’s some decisions at Nowadays that are skewing the crowd in unfavorable directions.

It’s one of the darkest dance floors of any club in Brooklyn. There’s no ambient or static lighting or even anything coming from the sides except for the DJ booth, which enforces a natural orientation towards the front, since it’s the only consistent light in the room. Crowds tend to face towards the DJ anyways, which is isn’t necessarily bad — it provides some consistency and structure to the dance floor — but at other clubs or parties I see far more people facing each other rather than the DJ. There’s at least the inklings of a social experience.

But it’s also the foggiest club in Brooklyn. No matter what night you go, whatever genre is playing, it’s going to get so foggy that you can’t see people’s faces. Even as early as midnight. It’s one thing to dunk everyone in darkness and fog at like 3 or 4am, it’s another to have it that way the entire night. So even if people do turn towards each other, it can be quite hard to make connections.

I have a lot more thoughts on this, but I’m pushing myself towards discipline in this. I want to be reliable and regular, even if my writing is not perfect. There’s always next time. For now, I’ve got some lovely atmospheric techno to jump into here at Bossa.

Thank you so much for reading.

Previous issues

• the bass party
• more than just music
• art of the promo
• launch

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