emergent San Francisco rave community set forth to emit the signals of a ‘liberation
theology’. Writing in 1996, Hill stated:
Something is going down in California.... The SF [San Francisco] Rave
Community are the precursors of that something.... The post-literate techno
prankster is just a hint of what is promised.... The movement is gaining in
strength, in numbers, in vision, in purpose. It is international in scope, and,
like a strange new virus in our cultural biocomputer, it is not to be ignored.
(Hill 1999:106)Hill went on to display the mood of possibility that pervaded this community, a
network identifying with the countercultural advances made by 1960s forebears,
and whose goal was to ‘re-adapt, re-educate, re-generate in order to face our
responsibilities for the future of the Earth and all the species upon it’ (ibid.:99). A
1992 article by Anarchic in Rhythmos audaciously broadcast that ‘we are the
generation’ (in Twist 1999:8). Come-Unity, the early ‘House Nation’ crew, stated
‘We Are The Planet’s Future’ (ibid.:29). And Mission Earth, an early San Francisco
rave, stated on its flier: ‘always remember we have a responsibility to guide the next
generation into the next millennium’ (Hill 1999:105).
As part of the WholeLife Expo, members of the SF Rave Community had
converged at the SF Cyberforum on 30 April 1993, where expatriate Briton and
Toon Town organizer Mark Heley stated: ‘it is important that we only have one
item on our agenda: Heal the Planet’ (in Eisner 1994 xviii). In another statement
attributed to Heley: ‘When you dance you integrate your body with your mind, you
integrate your individuality with the collective, and you integrate this human race
with the planet’ (in Hill 1999:105). Indeed it was the intentional ritualizing of
trance dance that came to feature prominently in an emergent spiritual practice
developing on the periphery of the electronic dance community—itself becoming
saturated with the integrated foci of person and planet. Consistent with webs of
understanding manifesting in New Age and Neo-Pagan networks (St John 200 la),
an eco-dance consciousness rose within the post-rave community, revealing the
interdependence of self-growth and planetary-conservation among its participants.
Clark had earlier pointed out that the ‘local rave is the local opening point...[in] the
battle to save the planet and ourselves’.^33 The integrated web of self and globe, of
thinking globally and acting locally, retained a strong presence in later dance
discourse and practice.
Contemplating the meaning, purpose and direction of the ‘energy’ or ‘vibe’ often
stated and felt to be at the heart of the local ‘tribal’ party, Jason Keehn (a.k.a.
Cinnamon Twist) has articulated a self-globe ethic arrived at via Gurdjieffian
philosophy, eliciting an affirmative response to the enquiry about whether trance-
dancing can ‘save the planet’. In a self published essay, Keehn (2001) builds on
Gurdjieff’s doctrine of ‘reciprocal maintenance’ to speculate about the possible role
of underground global dance culture, thus following Clark (and McKenna) in
valorizing psychedelicized mass trance dances as the viable ‘antidote’ to the egotism
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