8
Selecting ritual
DJs, dancers and liminality in underground dance music
Morgan Gerard
This chapter seeks to explore a contemporary performance arena where the liminal
space the anthropologist Victor Turner believed once belonged to tribal ritual can
be located—namely, that of underground dance music and its performance at raves
and clubs. Following the processual model initially established by Arnold van
Gennep (1960) and later refined by Turner, I argue that ritual transformation in
rave and club events is made possible by both the spatialization and performance of
music and the ways in which participants negotiate liminality throughout the course
of events. Drawing from a brief ethnographic case study of Toronto’s Turbo
Niteclub, and by focusing on the interstitial moments of music and dance, I
investigate how liminally located interactions between performers and audiences
generate potentially transformative experiences.
In his quest to locate contemporary manifestations of liminal performance,
Victor Turner wrote about ‘retribalization as an attempt to restore the original
matrix of ritual’ (1984:25). Vague as to what constitutes ‘retribalization’, Turner
seemed to be subtly mandating his readers to seek out those communities,
organizations or ‘tribes’ in their own immediate geographies whose activities or events
were somehow distinguished from the more ritually impoverished main-stream of
Western society Through investigating and, more importantly, participating in events
which embody the multidimensionality of tribal ritual—speech, music, dance, art
and so on—Turner suggested that the transformative experiences of our agrarian
forebears could be rejoined and recovered by post-industrial citizens long separated
from such creative activities by the division of labour and other changes in society.
It is a suggestion he made throughout his writing, first appearing in The Ritual
Process (1969), where he briefly mentioned the liminality of Halloween, attempts
made by hippies to recreate certain ritual conditions under which spontaneous
communitas might be conjured, and the ritual-ness of participating in groups as
diverse as black youth street gangs, the Ku Klux Klan and Hell’s Angels. In Dramas,
Fields and Metaphors (1974), he grants three pages of (somewhat condescending)
discussion to rock music scenes and how they might figure in his understanding of
tribal communitas and ritual. In Process, Performance and Pilgrimage (1979a), he
extended his acknowledgments of Western liminal practices to include the activities
and initiation rites of religious or quasi-religious organizations such as churches,