subcultural signs, Thornton misses the most active illustrations of how her all-
important insider/outsider dichotomy is resolved or transformed.
This inattention to dramaturgical features is also characteristic of the post-
structuralist approaches to rave and club cultures (Redhead 1993; Pini 1997;
Rietveld 1998; Stanley 1997; Martin 1999) which, when invoking the ritual-ness of
underground dance music without accounting for the central role of music and
dance, construct idealized versions of raves and clubs rather than actual instances of
situated, performed events. The result is that references to raves and clubs as ritual
events or to DJs as ritual specialists remain primarily metaphorical, anecdotal and
often culled from what might be called the ‘who feels it knows it’ approach of
privileging informant testimonials. Readers interested in the co-construction of events
by multiple participants are given little or no analysis of the specific performative
contexts from which to understand how a house music event is like a church, how a
DJ can be likened to a shaman and how communitas is built from the dance floor.
Not even a recent initiate in rave or club culture would expect that what was lost
can now be found simply by magically dressing up a venue, hoping a DJ will
perform as he might have previously, or expecting a crowd of dancers instantly to
commune. If an event is like a church, a DJ like a shaman and a dance floor like
communitas, it is because they are actively transformed as such through ongoing
interactions between performers and participants as they experience music and
dance. How DJs and dancers engage in this potential for transformative experiences
has only recently emerged as a topic for serious consideration by scholars. Until
Fikentscher’s (2000) ethnomusicological study of interactivity at New York City
clubs, most authors simply provided clues as to the ‘direct and reciprocal
relationship between the DJ and his audience’ (Langlois 1992:236). While the
dance music press, insider accounts and testimonials from DJs and dancers
suggested a fertile ground for investigation, scholars tended to avoid the dialectical
possibilities inherent in performance analyses or phenomenologically inspired
investigations by simply treating such interactions as somehow ineffable. With the
publication of You Better Work! (2000), however, Fikentscher provided the first
academic framework for understanding how a successful event is co-constructed vis-
à-vis DJ-dancer interactions. I have taken up this general theme elsewhere in
reference to the interactional work conducted by MCs in tandem with DJs and
dancers at Toronto drum ‘n’ bass events (Gerard and Sidnell 2000). Both studies point
to the temporalization and spatialization of events combined with structured
performance techniques and social context as central features of what most
participants consider to be essential ritualized events in their lives. Here, music and
dance are the ‘molecules of ritual’ (V.Turner 1969:14), the combined and
recombined aesthetic symbols or forms responsible for ‘the structuring of structure’
in all such events (Kapferer 1986:202). Such structuring and the process by which
the aforementioned phenomena might occur can be further elaborated by
considering van Gennep’s three phases of ritual as they are applied to music
(primarily) and dance (secondarily).
SELECTING RITUAL 169