ABSTRACT
The amplified dance music carries me into another plane of experience; its regular beat comforting me while a world of musical textures, rhythms and visual impressions whirls around me. I forget about how I arrived here, about my usual daily life, myself. My body seems to have shed its burdens of human existence, its limitations reduced: free at last, free at last. Time is now and always, fragments of seconds, breaking to a blur of party weekends, then smoothing out into a transcendental sense of forever. Bodies of fellow dancers brushing, strangers have gone, we are all friends, in it together; we are as one. Thinking in terms of differentiation eliminated, I am immersed. Stepping out of this sense of immersion, walking now around the periphery of the event, I notice the repetitive 4/4 beats of a house-music-related dance music that is pumped out of a rather oversized set of speakers, flanking a person wearing headphones, the DJ, playing recordings, mixing them seamlessly, taking control over the mood of the party. Meanwhile, lights and smoke are interfering with the visual field, making clear observations cumbersome. The dancing crowd of people looks like a unified mass, some people more individuated than others, swayed by musical manipulations, by visual fragmentation and enhanced by dance drugs.
