Welcome to Dada Strain, 20th of February
Monthly Update & Perspective: Learning to Grieve from the Ghosts of Dancing Ceremonies + Dada Strain Radio
First off, I want to thank you for subscribing to Dada Strain, and for reading. (You could have signed up for any music content feed in the world, but you’re here with me, and I appreciate it.)
This is the third monthly “Welcome to…” communique updating subscribers on what Dada Strain is about, what it aspires to be, and what is happening with it beyond the “newsletter” (which has admittedly been a little infrequent over the last 30 days—more on that at the bottom). Dada Strain is by design a continuously developing project, so this regularly timed post is meant to simultaneously (re)iterate and parse its purpose and values in real time—writing them through and will them into being—then turning its ideas into (hopefully) coherent engagements with the world, that could prove useful for the future. A “future” partially rooted in various, often under-appreciated “pasts,” and in our collective presence.
The “pasts” have been especially present over the past week or so. Some of my own have been loitering like bored ghosts, picketing my dreams, hanging about in mid-air thought-balloons-style, waiting to have their say, or to mark an anniversary (maybe even a few of them). Ghosts always seem to be around this time of year, ready to celebrate Lunar New Year or Mardi Gras, ceremonial carnivals that have crossed eras of meaning for centuries, time-worn journeys full of useful future-forward-motion information. Ghosts also love to haunt the forlorn on Valentine’s Day, a date celebrated by many less Hallmark-oriented sentimentalists who dance to the music— and who believe the ritual of dancing important to one’s historical, emotional and spiritual alignment—as “Love Saves the Day.” i.e. The anniversary of the first New York City party later christened as “The Loft,” which its musical host, David Mancuso, threw on February 14th in 1970. An anniversary Loft happens in Manhattan’s East Village every year (on the Sunday of the three-day February weekend), where you can easily spot ghosts partying with the living. As it should be.
The DIY community around The Loft (we use the word “family,” judge if you want) has served as an archetype for many of the best things about late 20th century dance and party culture. A year ago I published a piece about The Loft community’s golden anniversary, one that I am pretty proud of, and which outlines many of its defining elements. The “big” birthday made last year’s occasion even greater, and it should go without saying that in retrospect, after our collective year of no dancing, it seems that much more significant. (I met multiple people that night who’d travelled from out of state, and flew back into the headwind of a raging pandemic.) It also heralded something like a new weather. We woke up the morning after to the devastating news that Andrew Weatherall had died. So the ghosts of communal movement planted themselves like gargoyles on that last Loft’s porch, and made themselves comfortable, questioning the future. What might this community and dancing be like where we’re headed?
The Next Times are already being gerrymandered by a variety of vested interests, lobbyists for whom “saving” the dance “scene” is a business priority. Destination: “normalcy.” Yet it’s hard to imagine returning to a routine that felt so out of whack on so many levels that much of the community has spent months almost continually paying lip service to notions of “change.” It’s not just the issues of worst practices, or identity, representation and discrimination, or developmental gluttony which require a rethink, but the interconnections of all these to the cultural illiteracy and socio-economic disregard in which they flourish.
Conversely, there are many other people trying to reimagine whatever happens next by constructing the communal need for informed presence, and by considering how things will sound and how they are done—by whom, with whom and for whom. On some occasions, when you stumble into public exchanges on this topic, what appears into view is a glimmer that integrates freedom, historicity and a new set of social norms that really does stretch the potential of possibilities.
In fact, from this gargoyle’s perch, the more elemental question of what the Next Times hold isn’t about externalities like energy and purpose, but how what we’re collectively living through ATM makes us evolve, and what it is emotionally instigating inside each of us. We’ve all been affected/afflicted, whether as individuals or social groups or both, in a range of reactions and feelings that many of us have yet to consider. Trauma is not an either/or binary, working in mysterious, different ways on different people. None of this is new, but the entertainment industrial complex seems to have given no consideration of trauma’s effect on culture, especially on experiences such as dance, more associated with abandon than with grief. (As though the two are not inherently interrelated.) This is where the knowledge—or lack thereof—of history’s ghosts comes into play; and where The Loft’s ghosts can prove especially insightful.
While the impetus of having Next Times resemble Last Times has the backing of the economic system at large, the progress into a new reality that speaks to our recent history—to what we’ve learned herein and to where we must go—has plenty of great models in many different pasts. Not the least of which is The Loft, since Mancuso’s passing in 2016, a community-run institution whose participants have survived social and civic deterrents (familiar to many disobedient, marginalized radicals), a health epidemic (AIDS) that decimated its core constituency (gay men), and a changing landscape that found its culture (essentially, “Disco”) aging and in the way; all the while espousing beliefs and ethical qualities that centered on emergent urban strategies, an intertwining of collective survival and joy. (The Loft happens to be only the most handy example. On any given week, other models and texts—whether in the form of Sun Ra and his Arkestra, or in the writing of Octavia Butler and adrienne maree brown—stride to the fore; all sharing a grounding in the radical Black American experience, which is neither a coincidence nor should ever be dismissed as one.)
Among the crucial, natural parts built into the social mechanics of The Loft has been an openness towards a full range of collective emotion, which of course includes grief, a public mournfulness and release. Tears are as much a staple under its balloon-filled ceiling as baby powder, and people’s comfort with engaging both in the same healing space is what separates The Loft from any other dance party I’ve been to over and over. The ghosts know its lessons. Without such tears and an opportunity to give ourselves time to grieve together, openly and outside of the privacy of our quarantines, in a way that makes sense both when we’re together and when we’re alone, there can be no notion of a united dance-floor, “scene” or any such utopiana rightly or wrongly ascribed to this culture. In a Washington Post piece from April, that I’ve found myself returning pretty regularly to Eddie Glaude wrote that “[grief of the pandemic’s dead] will hover over our choices about the future of America.” I would argue that it hovers over much more important matters than that.
New & Noteworthy: There are two primary reasons I have not published more non-listicle Dada Strain pieces: One is that I have been working on pieces that have been published elsewhere (a feature on the new Madlib album, Sound Ancestors co-produced by Keran “Four Tet” Hebden, for NPR Music; and a feature on writer Thulani Davis and her new book of poetry, ‘Nothing But the Music,’ for Bandcamp Daily), or are set to be published. Note that much of the work written for other platforms will also have extensions on Dada Strain. The other is that I have been working on aspects of Dada Strain that have yet come to light, but are well on their way to. Though one did mark its debut in the past month: Dada Strain Radio is now a monthly show on Brooklyn’s community station, The Lot Radio, at 10a EST every fourth Friday (approximately the first Fri of the month at the moment), playing a mixture of rhythm improvisation and community. Follow Dada Strain on Twitter and on Instagram for more words, sounds and ideas.
Previous ‘Welcome To Dada Strain’ thought-balloons:
[Photos of balloon drops at The Loft c/o Kate Glicksberg and Jane Lerner]