ABSTRACT
On a crisp January Sunday afternoon in Montreal, a hundred or so people parade onto the long, winding skating rink stretching through Parc Lafontaine. On top of the requisite winter coats, tuques, and gloves, people are dressed for play, wearing wigs, vintage furs, sequined vests, and animal costumes. All are also wearing headphones, skating or walk-sliding across the ice to the same beat. They are the Silent Disco Squad, whose mission is to “turn the world into a dance floor” thereby “re-enchanting a disenchanted world” (Zangwill 2014). Many reach out repeatedly to onlookers, inviting skaters-by to listen in through their headphones, and to join the next party and thus the movement. The Silent Disco Squad seeks more than making merry on a cold day-it works to replicate the ritualistic, even ecstatic, shared experience of dancing with others at a music festival. The Squad’s primary commitment is the reclaiming of public urban spaces for collective, ludic celebration (www.silentdiscosquad.com). In so doing, it promotes a form of self-expression that doesn’t take itself too seriously, since people tend to look funny dancing without music. It also recasts the experience of wearing headphones as tools that protect the user from the crowd by producing a sense of isolation in public. With headphones on, the listener listens in and with others. Instead of fostering social isolation, the headphones used by the Silent Disco dancers bring people together. The music track is crowd-sourced in advance and on the day of the event the dancers gather and countdown to the moment when they simultaneously press play on their devices.
