Dance Floor Liberation

Los Angeles–based dance artist Jay Carlon knew that the proscenium stage couldn’t house his 2024 work, “Wake,” in its fullness. So he moved it elsewhere: to a rave.

Jay Carlon in “Wake.” Photograph by Argel Rojo

“I was thinking about spaces of queer refuge, and what better space than the dance floor?” Carlon says of the work, which explores themes of grief and devotion through his experiences as a queer, Filipinx artist. “I thought the best place for this grief ritual to happen would be a space where queer and BIPOC folks feel safe, and often that is in the dark warehouse spaces at four in the morning.”

In October 2024, Carlon curated a one-night-only event that included the premiere of “Wake,” performances from Asian drag collective Send Noods, local artists selling their wares, a tarot card reader—and, of course, an active dance floor.

Carlon is not the only dance artist finding fodder in club spaces and rave culture. In fact, in recent years, these sorts of dance works have proliferated. Sharon Eyal’s “R.O.S.E.” transformed New York City’s Park Avenue Armory into a participatory rave/performance experience last fall, and Jennifer Archibald’s commission for the Washington Ballet, “LucidNoise,” which premiered in February, was inspired by the underground raving scene.

Dance artists are also looking towards dance and electronic music producers as sonic collaborators. Wayne McGregor and Kyle Abraham have used the work of lauded electronic composer Jlin, while Oona Doherty has developed a lasting professional relationship with popular English DJ and producer Jamie xx. Last fall, commercial wunderkind Zoï Tatopoulos collaborated with 070 Shake on a one-night-only dance performance, “A Night at the Ballet,” to launch the musician’s latest album.

Faye Stoeser and Hannah Ekholm, who perform as a dance duo under the name Ekleido, recently collaborated with DJ and producer Floating Points (who is also Ekholm’s romantic partner) for a double bill at DanceEast in Ipswich, UK. “I feel like contemporary dance is meant to be of the now, and electronic music is of the now,” says Stoeser. “It makes sense that these collaborations are starting to happen.”

Faye Stoeser and Hannah Ekholm performing as Ekleido. Photograph by Henry Curtis

But while these recent rave-themed works and electronic music collaborations feel of-the-moment in 2025, dancers have been inhabiting club spaces for far longer. Styles like voguing, which is a major influence for Stoeser and Ekholm, were born in underground, club environments. Jas Lin, a Los Angeles–based dance artist who works within club culture, mentions that, after the first butoh performances in Japan caused a large uproar among the art-going community, early practitioners of butoh turned to similar community-organized spaces to continue to showcase their work. “Because of the underground ethos, there’s less barrier to entry for an experimental performance to exist,” Lin says.

Still, concert dance and raving is, outwardly, a somewhat unlikely pairing. Concert dance is often regarded as an esoteric and somewhat stuffy art form. It’s seen as inaccessible, typically housed in centrally-located, multi-million dollar complexes and funded by wealthy donors inhabiting the upper echelons of society. Raving, on the other hand, is a culture that thrives in the underground. It’s built on community organizing and offers an alternative space free from social norms and rules. Because of this, it’s traditionally inhabited by communities on the margins.

Combining the two worlds is a statement in itself. But, amongst the artists that are building this connective tissue, it’s also an attempt at transmuting the liberation, healing, and freedom found on the dance floor into more structured choreographic work.

“The intersection of dance and rave space that I’m interested in is just this potential of feeling free in our bodies,” says Lin. “What does having access to embodied freedom look like, and how does it shape how we move in our lives outside of dance and the club?”

Jas Lin's “Nematocyst.” Photograph by Ink Agop

In 2023 and 2024, Lin toured their work, “Nematocyst,” through clubs across Asia. Costumed as a jellyfish-like creature, they guided club-goers through a participatory performance experience designed to release “raw” and “feral” energy through dance. As audiences were welcomed with a short performance, Lin’s movements were intentional and deeply musical, but simultaneously possessed a deep disinhibition. The confidence with which they embodied the weird and uncanny created a portal into which audiences could enter and participate by moving their own bodies. At the end of the work, Lin explains, “the soundtrack kind of oozes into ocean-wave sounds, and I use this tentacle to mark everybody in the room with a stamp that says ‘You are free.’ I invite the audience to lay on the club floor with me and it’s a really nice moment of transitioning from this feeling of individual embodied freedom to this collectivity.”

London-based dance artist Holly Blakey’s exploration of rave culture also stemmed from a desire to create community. It began 10 years ago with a work called “Some Greater Class,” which confronted notions of “high” and “low” culture and questioned the ways society assigns value. It was also an attempt, she says, to channel the rave space’s union between audience and performer.

Since then, the rave ethos has become part of Blakey’s signature. Her movement vocabulary possesses a lack of inhibition similar to Lin’s—and keeps this mood even when the work is not dealing with the themes and spaces of raves and clubs directly. “The non-structured, non-formed, outside-of-feeling and experiential, momentary movement has been something that’s threaded through everything I’ve done,” Blakey says.

Works like these are emerging at a time when the concert dance world is intentionally addressing issues of diversity and purposefully making space for genres from different communities and cultures. “There is a space in the theater for club culture to be showcased, just the same as classical music and classical ballet,” Stoeser says. “Freestyle is now coming into theater spaces, and it’s nice to see these styles getting space on those stages.” It is also, according to Carlon, Lin, Blakey, Ekholm, and Stoeser, attracting new audiences—which is, of course, an evergreen conversation in the dance world.

Sharon Eyal's “R.O.S.E” at Park Avenue Armory, NY. Photograph by Stephanie Berger, courtesy of Park Avenue Armory

While this growing body of work suggests an interest and acceptance of rave and club culture in concert dance, how far is this interplay poised to go? And is the interest of presenters rooted in real appreciation and understanding, or is it stemming more from trend-chasing? The answer, like most things, is probably somewhere in the middle.

Undoubtedly, dance and raving share a sense of ephemerality. Numerous ingredients—in just the right quantities and at just the right time—come together to form something magic. But even if all the ingredients are present, it can be a challenge to create the same result twice. Concert dance is built on the ability to conjure this feeling, but pinning down rave space might prove a bit more elusive. The key will be in walking the fine line between curated and contrived, so as to preserve—but still successfully manufacture—a sense of dance floor liberation.

Sophie Bress

Sophie Bress is an arts and culture journalist and dance critic. She regularly contributes to Dance Magazine and Fjord Review, and has also written for the New York Times, NPR, Observer, Pointe, and more.

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