ABSTRACT
An Italian-American, David Mancuso, started to host a party called the Loft in an abandoned factory loft in the NoHo area in 1970, drawing primarily gay and/or black patrons. The Loft was going to effect a sea change in the future of social dancing and nighttime socialization locally, nationally and even globally. This chapter examines the cultural politics formed around social dancing and alternative communities (made up mostly of racial/ethnic minorities) developed in the Loft, and contextualizes it in the city’s transition to a post-industrial city. The kind of politics that was created in the Loft and its contemporary parties and clubs took on the character of the “carnivalesque” that Bakhtin (1984) ascribed to popular carnival cultures in the medieval marketplace. Standing in sharp contrast to the medieval ruling-class cultures of hierarchy, authority, orderliness and selfabnegation sponsored and enacted by the Church and the state, the carnivalesque was “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order . . . the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions” (Bakhtin 1984: 10). It was a Dionysian festival in which the body was celebrated, specifically “grotesque” bodies characterized by and associated with profane words, degradation, disorder, unrestrained sensuality, dancing, singing, over-eating and over-drinking, cross-dressing and laughing—the very opposite of disembodied, cleansed, prohibited and closed official “classic” bodies (ibid.: 24–26). Individual bodies were closely connected to the collective body of people in the carnival, unlike the individualism that later prevailed in bourgeois cultures. The carnival was a site for deviant and undisciplined bodies, and in it, hierarchies and ruling norms were mocked and transgressed, and the world was turned upside-down. NYC’s underground parties and dance clubs in the 1960s to 1970s to a significant degree resembled the carnival and its body politics.
