explanation of the party’s significance, and indeed that of post-rave culture, will be
grounded in a renovation of Turner.
With recourse to Turner, the dance party is (as addressed in Chapters 4 and 8 ) a
space of communal liminality, or spontaneous communitas. In the pan-human
modality of communitas, esoteric knowledge and understanding is shared between
neophytes, cultists, communards, pilgrims or tourists who experience a direct and
immediate abandonment of socioculturally mediated divisions in ‘a place that is no
place, and a time that is no time’ (Turner 1983:103). The ‘communitas spirit’
resonates with millenarian and revitalization movements as it ‘presses always to
universality and ever-greater unity’ (Turner 1983:202). With names like Come-
Unity, Utopia, Tribedelic, Oracle, Exodus, etc., dance party organizations labour to
replicate the liminal experience of the ‘tribal’ neophyte, the ‘cult’ member, the hippy
communard, the pagan ‘ritual’, the sacred pilgrimage, the epic quest or hunt. As
subcultural ‘VIPs’ conspire to forge ‘normative communitas’ (see Chapter 8), the
successful formulae for dancescapes from Earthdance to Tribal Gathering is
enshrined.
In a parallel alluded to in Castle’s Tokyo Techno Tribes, the party is something of
an experiential equivalent to the Japanese matsuri—the Shinto festival of
community renewal, purification and blessing, where under anti-structural
conditions participants make public transit to a sensational realm of experience in
which the usual conventions, demands and distinctions of daily life recede.^15 In his
inspired insider’s account, Fritz accumulates rich evidence of the resonant
experience:
With the rave experience, intellectual processes are overridden as you
surrender to the music and experience a sense of brotherhood and
camaraderie and a feeling of unification. You become connected on a
molecular level to everyone and everything. All is well with the world.
(Jane of Art, in Fritz 1999:52)Demonstrating that rave is not isolable as a Self-spirituality not exclusively a ‘cult of
the individual’, in such a zone dancers ‘experience deep feelings of unlimited
compassion and love for everyone around them.... For a few hours they are able to
leave behind a world full of contradiction, conflict and confusion, and enter a
universal realm where everyone is truly equal, a place where peace, love, unity and
respect are the laws of the land’ (Fritz 1999:43, 172). The deep logic of such an
experience is that it is simultaneously impermanent and perennial. While the party
paroxysms are ‘fleeting moments of intense interconnectedness’ (Pini 2001:167),
they are recurrent in time and replicate in space. The cyclical, iterative, mutant
reproduction of such ephemeral ‘hypercommunities’ (Kozinets 2002) is indicative
of the universal function of liminality, which in the case of rave possesses an
extraordinarily indeterminate telos.
Yet, while there are many possible outcomes, the idea of the rave-utopia is central
to the imaginary. Commentators have highlighted the disappearance of a sense of
28 GRAHAM ST JOHN