drugs dread losing their party favours; ticket holders and those hoping to pay inside,
if arriving during peak hours (1.00–3.00 a.m.), are concerned the club might be at
capacity and they will have to wait until enough people leave before they are
permitted entry; and, if they arrive before the official 1.00 a.m. cut-off, being asked
to join the ticket line can be particularly humiliating for those who believe their
insider status should exclude them from paying. The waiting and uncertainty posed
by entering Turbo and the mandatory body search for items deemed ‘ritual
pollutants’^3 seem to correspond somewhat to the pattern of separation rites as van
Gennep understands them. But Turner has argued that separation ‘is more than just
a matter of entering a temple—there must be in addition a rite which changes the
quality of time also, or constructs a cultural realm which is defined as “out of time”’
(V.Turner 1982:24). That rite, I suggest, is music. Arriving at Turbo by foot or by
car, the anticipation generated by a thumping bass reverberating through the club is
particularly dramatic. As each familiar record and mix is played by the DJ inside the
club, those waiting outside become excited and expectant. Neither in the club nor
the public realm, time spent in line is suspended time where patrons dutifully await
music’s power to restructure their temporal sense of ‘being-in-the-world’ (Rouget
1980:122).
It then follows that the interior of Turbo could be characterized as the transitional
space. For van Gennep, this is a ‘neutral zone’ between worlds, standing outside of
culture (1960:18); for Victor Turner it is ‘a no-man’s-land betwixt-and-between the
structural past and the structural future’ (1990:11). In the context of underground
dance music events, the liminal territory in question is that which Fikentscher
(2000) calls the ‘counterpublic sphere’; Stanley (1997), Martin (1999) and St John
(Chapter 1) refer to as ‘heterotopia’ (Foucault 1986); and Gibson and Pagan (1997)
and May (2000) designate the ‘temporary autonomous zone’ (Bey 1991). All of
these characterizations suggest a realm of the subjunctive (V.Turner 1982) and the
intersubjective (Pini 1997), an arena where participants might construct alternate
identities and, perhaps, apply experiences of the liminal to their post-liminal lives. At
Turbo, immersion in the liminal is reflected in the club’s design.
Having passed the guest list, cleared security and presented my ticket through a
glass booth, I am immediately directed inside by another security guard. Entering
the club down a flight of stairs (which leads to the drum ‘n’ bass room in the
basement), I then go upstairs, where Tim Patrick is playing a set of minimal house
and tech-house to a sparsely populated room. At 10.45 p.m. this is no surprise; club
events in Toronto rarely attract large crowds until 1.00 a.m. Although a number of
people are mingling at bars, standing around the edges of the dance floor and sitting
in the small area serving as a VIP room, nobody is dancing.
At Turbo, whether drum ‘n’ bass downstairs or house, tech-house and techno
upstairs, for those ‘watching’ the dance floor from the vantage point of the VIP
room or from the downstairs foyer or the bar, music is omnipresent and its palpable
presence mediates all forms of social activity inside the club. But if dance is generally
considered the central activity of such events, how do we account for non-dancing
patrons in the context of raves and clubs as ritual? Previous scholarly works on
SELECTING RITUAL 171