Our dancing goes right back to our beginnings. Primatologists who have observed how chimpanzees produce rhythmic patterns of sound — in response to loud and overwhelming stimuli in their environment — speculate that our own music and dance might have originated from similar behaviors. Over time, humans combined such rhythmic sound with movement, honing the rhythms we moved to and the way we gyrated and flowed, and building the origins of something resembling the way we dance to music today.
What a wonderful idea — that music and dance might have originated as a way of coping with the often overwhelming experience of simply being in the world. A means of reflecting and refashioning all that noise and chaos: the riot of a thunderstorm, the fury of a stampede. A refuge from all we were afraid of in nature, and a refuge from our fear of one another.
But how do you dance away a contagion? What happens when the act of gathering itself is the thing we have learned to be afraid of? What are humans to do when a pandemic shuts down all hope of being together?
In 2020, life went into a kind of enforced stasis. Our exhausted cities slumped onto their sides and attempted to put themselves into the recovery position. The places where we once gathered to dance were closed, the speakers unplugged, the lights that glittered so invitingly switched off.
Without the joy of human proximity, how were we to process this new overwhelm, this new chaos?
Like most people in the United Kingdom, my girlfriend and I spent 20 months in various states of quarantine, locked away inside our small apartment in London or taking long, slow walks around a local park. The pandemic required us to adopt a life of carefully choreographed isolation.
We often danced alone in our living room. We danced when we were feeling low or when we’d had an argument. We listened to our upstairs neighbor playing the piano and danced along to the songs we knew. We began and ended workshops we ran over Zoom with children on the other side of the world with five minutes of furious movement to New Order or Beyoncé, reaching out as far as we could into the space between us. But all of it was a poor facsimile for the euphoric togetherness we once felt and still craved.
So in fall 2021, as the coronavirus finally relented, we knew what we needed to do: We had to go dancing.
We took a train to the north of England to dance under luminous pink lights in a warehouse full of strangers. We felt both light and heavy as we anticipated the night ahead, trying to remember what it was like to be around so many people.
Once, we had danced without a care — in basements where sweat sluiced down the walls, our bodies pressed up against other bodies. We passed around cigarettes and little bottles of water, and when the beat really dropped, we lifted our heads to scream our approval, each of us a tiny fountain of saliva spraying euphorically into the humid nightclub air.
How ecstatic and how disgusting it had all been. Would it feel like this again? Did we even want it to?
Nightclubs are not usually the places for such equivocation. They revel in their ability to temporarily obliterate the divisions and conflicts of the real world in the effervescence of shared belonging. In Berlin, for example, it was the fall of the wall in 1989 that truly initiated the city’s now legendary techno scene, as music first nurtured in the West met new devotees and a wonderland of abandoned Soviet architecture in the East.
“The unification of Germany happened on the dance floor,” record producer Mark Reeder recalled. “It didn’t happen in politics until much later.”
Now, in 2021, here we were, a society meeting again in the wake of an entirely different kind of separation. Nightclubs used to be places of refuge and ecstatic congregation, and we wanted this dance floor to again be a place of reunification. Yet at first, my girlfriend and I stood in the corner of the vast warehouse, gripping our drinks and keeping ourselves to ourselves.
Jamie Principle, one of the original doyens of early house music, described the experience of clubbing as “like going to church and letting yourself be free without worrying about all the craziness that was happening in the streets and in the world.” But a pandemic reconfigures people’s understanding of fear and safety. It feeds on our desire to seek comfort in one another and forces us to learn to resist it — to perform a managed retreat from the world.
Anticipating our trepidation, the night’s organizers had pulled out all the stops to generate a party atmosphere. A phalanx of costumed performers moved through the nervous crowd like a deranged cheer squad: smiling, clapping, posing for pictures, tossing giant inflatable balls across the vast room — all to little effect.
In the end, the solution to the problem of our collective reluctance was much simpler than this enforced jollity. The answer was sound.
Even if sharing the space felt fraught, music was something we could share unambiguously, as comforting and insistent as a heartbeat. Under the lights, a machine pulse twisted itself like a knot around the crowd, then pulled us slowly toward one another. As it did so, everything changed.
We grinned like idiots, understanding that this sacred space indeed retained its old power to dispel our fears. We leaned over to our neighbors and shouted our incredulity into their ears, that we were back here, all together again, and it felt, if not normal, then comfortingly familiar in a way nothing had for nearly two years.
We might never quite dance the way we did before. The memory of the pandemic now lives in our bodies. But it was reassuring to know this ecstatic refuge existed for the times we might need it.
It is there now, as you read this, empty and waiting. The people who will later fill it are scattered all over town — some at work, some watching television, some dancing around their living rooms, strobe lights already flickering inside them. These people are connected, though they don’t know it yet. Haze and pink lights already swirl, pulling them closer.
Soon, they will be together. And perhaps you will be there with them, too, dancing your fears away.
