performances, community safety, first aid, clean-up and so on of free parties, such as
those described by Collin (1997: ch. 6), Rietveld (1998b) Tramacchi (2000) and St
John (2001a), is that such participation confers an experience differentiated
markedly from the ‘consensus trance’ of event-consumption predominant in the
commercial party environment. Like Moontribe or Oracle Gatherings, such events
are ‘the work of the people’. There is perhaps a sense that the gifting of time, skills,
resources, ‘sacraments’, venue/property, domain-hosting, etc. procures mana.
Community forged through mutual self-sacrifice is also a striking feature of fund-
and consciousness-raising events where, for instance, compassion for the
environment (St John 2001c), for people living with AIDS, the oppressed or, more
widely ‘planetary peace’ and justice also confers redemption. Possessing an
autonomous, immediate and ‘instituant’^24 character, potentiating the sacralization
of self and event-space through sacrifice, they facilitate the transformation of
performer-inhabitants.
Yet, while we can locate variant salvation experiences within diverse venues and
events, the reality is likely to be fuzzy and indeterminate—the boundaries obscure.
Thus, in the fashion of the hyper-liminal party, a single event will occasion differential
significance and outcomes for multiple participants, or even multiple effects and
functions for an individual over an event’s duration. Participants at an event possess
different motivations.^25 The interactional complexity of events has been addressed by
Malbon (1999) in his ethnography of London clubbing. For many habitués, at least
initially, the club or party constitutes an escape route from the ‘profane’, a
temporary release from work routines or underemployment, an opportunity for
clubbers/ravers to ‘resist’ ‘other aspects of their own lives’ (Malbon 1999:183). Yet
‘holiday’ or ‘escapade’ hardly exhausts the possibilities of such experiences, as they
contextualize the realization of inner strength and effervescence. In such spaces, acts
of ‘playful vitality’ enable freedom from old identities, while at the same time (or,
more likely, over a period of years) cultivating alternative identities and
identifications—catalysing new self and social fictions.
If ravers are like tourists, it is necessary to point out that, as with tourists, it is likely
that age, region, socio-economic, ethnic and educational background serve to
pattern a diversity of experience. It seems useful to characterize the raver experience
on a possibility continuum whereby tourist experience similar to that identified by
Erik Cohen (1992) may modulate over the event’s duration. A dance party may thus
provide a recreational interlude for rave-tourists whose experience approximates to
Cohen’s ‘diversionary’ or ‘experiential’ modes. Yet over the course of the event,
which could last for several hours or several days, inhabitants might rupture the
spectacular surfaces of a venue/space, to ‘disrupt forever any pre-existing
understanding of the organisation of nightlife pleasures’, ensuring that ‘nothing will
be the same again’ (Atkin and Lowe 1999:155). Adopting ‘experimental’ or
‘existential’ modes, such foreigners may occupy the landscape (and go ‘local’),
nomads may settle (at least temporarily) and ‘drifters’ may feel like they belong. As
events from indoor clubs to outdoor doofs contextualize the taking up of ‘house’
music and its various derivatives, initiates may discover ‘a space in which to dwell...
LIBERATION AND THE RAVE IMAGINARY 37