Body Kinesthetic Politic

Two fold purpose here. One is to pull out the paddles, rub them together and shock this blog back to life. The other is to do a post mortem on last weekend's dance party, a success in many ways thanks largely to my DJing counterparts, but also kind of a new development in what we've been doing this whole time.

To start then, a brief history. The dance parties pre-dated me as something called the Revolutionary Dance Party. The idea was a small, early party on a Friday or Saturday night, concentrated entirely on dancing and then spilling out into the town at large, with a group of people wound up physically and mentally, yes, but even more important (it seemed to me at least) grounded in their own bodies, aware of them as instruments of activity and joy. The individual body is the most basic unit of the state and when the body is viewed in this way, a locus of joy, the impact on the state will be positive. When the body is viewed as a locus of pain, of punishment or restriction (as is the case at the state level currently), the body and the state will always be in opposition, the state inflicting itself on the body rather than the body, or a collection of joyful bodies, restructuring the state into a network of interactions based in joy, pleasure, fulfillment.

This both is and is not as sexy as it sounds.

Revolutionary in goal, the RDP was famously fascist in execution. The rules were as follows:
1. Everyone must dance.
2. No one cannot dance.
3. Everyone must bring music to share*.
4. Everyone must bring a dance move to share.
5. Everyone must dance.

*In a strict RDP, the music had to be in a physical format, that is to say that iPods were frowned upon.

Because these events were small, intentional communities, the rules were easy enough to enforce: anyone who chose not to participate was asked to leave. The result was fluid and dynamic: it had no maker, no singular originator.

Contrast this with the auteur school of DJing: a singular virtuoso DJ (or series of DJs) exerting total control on a dance environment. This, of course, is the standard club model and can be downright amazing. Again, there is at least the auspice of an intentional community, since people who go to a dance club must do so at least on the pretense of dancing. But once in the environment, the myriad desires of the community members fall at odds to one another: people who came to dance are pestered by people who came to hook up, crowded by people who came to passively observe. At the same time, the DJ holds ultimate sway over the environment, and the crowd is at the whim of his personality. One DJ may favor feats of mixing, overlapping and blending over danceability or (as is more often the case) may fall back on prescripted sets that are entirely disconnected with the audience, relying on time-tested hits or (worse!) nostalgia and (worst!) imagined nostalgia to keep a crowd barely moving.

When we began doing dance parties in public, we faced an immediate problem. By nature of being public, the strict rules that held together RDPs could not be enforced (although we did have a little Dance Gestapo to gently encourage people to dance or else), but we had no inclination to have just another dance club setting. We wanted a Dance Party, dammit. With Dancing! So we tried the dialectic model. Benefits are obvious, I think: you winnow down your audience til you once again have a more or less intentional community. People would only come to, say, a Bowie vs. the Talking Heads dance party for one or a combination of three reasons:

1. They like Bowie.
2. They like the Heads.
3. They want to dance.

You have the added advantage of a certain level of partisanship, such that even people who aren't dancing at any given moment will more than likely be involved in the music through debate, a debate echoed by the back and forth of the music.

Also, you have the back and forth of the music: the DJs must be responsive to one another and, in an effort to make a case for their band of choice, must be responsive to the crowd's reactions. A crowd that dances hardest to rock-era Bowie is going to get more rock-era Bowie (and more rocking Heads songs), while a crowd that responds to the heavy polyrhythmic Heads tunes is going to get more of the same from the Heads, and an emotionally shattered Bowie DJ.

Part of the reason, I think, that we started with and have returned to the Cure vs. the Smiths is that there you've got two bands with whom people have a deep emotional, often personal memory, which, unlike an encyclopaedic knowledge of 80s pop stored in the cortex, is often written directly onto the body, deep down in neural passages formed in the vital and emotionally active teenage years. Note how this is diametrically opposed to nostalgia: it's not a pining for a time past, it's a visceral experience of an aspect of that time, of a different aspect of one's emotional being. Which is why the people really into it, many of them excellent dancers, tend to dance exactly the way they would at age 16 at the Smiths vs. Cure parties.

Finally, we expanded into what we had last week: the open source model. Let me stress that part: it's intended to be fully open source in that any one of the people DJing is fully replaceable, given that their replacement is equally impassioned about the music they intend to play. The open source way allows for maximum fluidity, maximum responsiveness to the crowd and, like the original RDP, a creation with no creator, an event that creates, fuels and sustains itself, that shapes its body out of its evolving self. The first time we tried it, I think we (and thus the event) was caught up in silly ideas of one-upping each other, with certain songs brought out for shock/kitsch value, but this time we had a real challenge. People began dancing at 9:30 and a mistake could kill momentum, cause the entire thing to collapse.

This is not entirely true after a point. Momentum can sustain itself through at least one dud. Isn't that right, Miami?

But this time, something really amazing happened. A community in place, intentionality built itself. Confirmed non-dancers danced, the "audience" in the spectator sense, found itself devoured, shaped into the body of the dancing crowd. Intentionality conquers apathy and the body kinesthetic rules over all!

Big successes: All of My Friends by LCD Soundsystem, for all eight minutes (credit to Luke), Balkan Beat Box, novel and unstoppable (credit to Jason) and the Passenger, bouncy, familiar and imbued with the creepy, beautiful energy of being swept along by a larger current (credit again to Jason).

Downpoints: the afterparty. Not because it was a bad afterparty, it was actually quite nice. But the afterparties are almost always a downpoint, even if they don't involve my ass gettting handcuffed. Because the only suitable follow-ups to a successful dance party of this type are as follows:

1. More dancing (why does this never happen, by the way?)
2. Making out*
3. Smashing the state into a million shiny pieces (why does this never happen either?)

*I sincerely hope many dancers are opting for this rather than the afterparties. Making out is (or at least should be) the final choosing of joy over the state.

Next month we go back to Vs. for a bit, give ourselves a little bit of structure, scratch the ol' dialectic itch. As far as this little blog goes, I have every intention of keeping it going this time out. I've got some album review/previews drafted, some thoughts on the comeback albums of indie bands and whether it's axiologically different from/better than yet another Who comeback and, umm...much much more!