Growing up in '90s Belgrade, Bogomir Doringer found solace and hope in clubbing, leading him to explore dance as both a personal coping mechanism and a political phenomenon. Born in Serbia and having moved to Amsterdam, the artist, curator, and PhD researcher has spent the last 15 years ushering in new, meaningful conversations that explore the political bearing of global dance floors. ‘Almost every movement holds some sort of political significance.’
‘It’s easy to think that dance is just that – a mere act of physicality, of moving your body’, Bogomir Doringer exclaims, adding how ‘dancing as we do is a byproduct of how we have historically reclaimed marginalised bodies (such as those of women, queer people, and people of colour) from body politics, bureaucracy, and all kinds of control or categorisations’. In our exchanges, it becomes clear that Doringer’s interest doesn’t lie within ‘happy’ or ‘joyous’ dances – a narrative of dance often spun by the West – but instead, he aims to ‘explore the dances of collective crises’ and how they ‘equip individuals and collectives with a sense of empowerment’, as he puts it.
Through his (numerous) projects, Doringer has undertaken the mission to investigate the collective and individual frenzies on dance floors across Europe by capturing moments in clubs with his camera from a bird’s eye view. Whether it was inside institutions like Berghain, Bassiani Club, or the seemingly clichéd Sensation White, Doringer discerned two distinct forms of dancing: entertainment-focused and urgency-driven.
Doringer elaborates on how each dance type comes embellished with its unique signifier. ‘Entertainment-focused dance is not necessarily attached to a moral idea.’ According to him, it moves blindly, often lacking any ulterior motive. ‘To that end, that’s pretty much what I saw at Sensation White’, he tells us; ‘people, largely dressed in white, with access to quality drugs, remained motionless in a perfect light and sound designed space, listening to their favourite music and staying in their own circles’. In contrast, his research project ‘Dance of Urgency’ (2019) delves into urgency-driven dance. ‘It’s dancing as a reaction or a response to the crises of collectives or individuals’, he reflects. ‘You need to move to resolve something, such as fear, insecurity, restlessness, possible death, and often you also move to find others like yourself.’ Where entertainment-focused dance is rose-tinted, pretty and palatable, urgency-driven becomes its younger, irreverent sister. It comes with grit and gnarl, and it is not for the fainthearted.
'Dance inherently embodies a form of body politics'
Transcending play: Dancing as a reclamation device
Doringer first epxlored these dance floor dynamics in his work ‘I Dance Alone’ in 2014, for which the artist was sent on a quest on dance floors across Georgia, the Netherlands, and Germany to explore the social phenomena of clubbing. Through his bird’s-eye view, Doringer studied the different collective and individual behavioural patterns and movements of habitual partygoers. ‘I wanted to understand the function of observed rituals and I to study what the movements inside clubs told us about what’s going on outside’, he explains.
To explore this even further, Doringer provides us with a set of provocations useful to see these patterns; ‘Are they dancing like they are fighting? Are they leaning into their bodies? Do they dance alone, or in a group? Are they synchronised, or do they feel disjointed?’ Through these different expressions, it becomes clear that dance comes loaded with varying degrees of emotions and intentions. It can be competitive, it can be explorative, it can be erotic. It can be a matter of tension and release, escapist, ritualistic, and even voyeuristic, but most notably; it can be political. ‘The stories I saw unfolding on the dance floor dispelled myths that dancing is only, well, dancing’, Doringer tells us. ‘I caught microscopic examples of how our bodies move, and compared them to patterns we see in nature.’ One of his findings is the way people position differently on different dance floors. ‘For instance, at a Funhouse gay party (a men-only party) the proximity between people is smaller compared to a straight student party. It is clear that sexual intention and mixing at a gay party is part of the ritual. A straight student party is following gender norms. Girls come with girls often. Guys with guys. Once the couple connects, they remain together and don't mix or go home together.’
‘I argue that almost every movement holds some sort of political significance, as dance inherently embodies a form of body politics’, Doringer emphasises, including ‘how it serves as a tool to reclaim your body often from becoming a political playground that is monitored by instancies as the government, the family, church and school’. But reclaiming something, whether it's bodies, freedom of speech, or cultures, implies that initially, the liberty to openly express it was denied without looming threats.
These dynamics of the politics of dance are famously seen in Voguing: a highly stylized, performative, and martial dance created by black and Latino communities (one notable mention is its founding father, Paris Dupree). Between the 1960s and ‘80s (subsequent to the queer Harlem Renaissance), New York drag competitions known as ‘balls’ transformed from elaborate pageantry to ‘vogue’ battles. ‘Voguing is a competitive dance’, Doringer reflects. ‘It’s a cross-pollination between roleplaying, and dancing, used by marginalised communities to assume certain social roles and positions frequently denied to them’.
So, when does raving, and dancing, become just that, a frivolous act of recreational drug use and frenetic dancing, and when can it start accumulating a degree of political meaning? For Doringer, a dance floor reaches its true, transformative potential when ‘the composition is that of like-minded people with the same intentions of what they’re trying to achieve on the floor’, he tells us. His research makes it explicitly clear that raving, as it stands, does not inherently equal ‘resistance’. Dancing becomes an act of resistance when it starts subverting and challenging societal and constitutional conventions. It is the people, oftentimes marginalised communities, that prescribe and imbue a space with ideas of liberation and emancipation; a cultural currency that transcends boundaries.
‘I argue that almost every movement holds some sort of political significance, as dance inherently embodies a form of body politics’, Doringer emphasises, including ‘how it serves as a tool to reclaim your body often from becoming a political playground that is monitored by instancies as the government, the family, church and school’. But reclaiming something, whether it's bodies, freedom of speech, or cultures, implies that initially, the liberty to openly express it was denied without looming threats.
These dynamics of the politics of dance are famously seen in Voguing: a highly stylized, performative, and martial dance created by black and Latino communities (one notable mention is its founding father, Paris Dupree). Between the 1960s and ‘80s (subsequent to the queer Harlem Renaissance), New York drag competitions known as ‘balls’ transformed from elaborate pageantry to ‘vogue’ battles. ‘Voguing is a competitive dance’, Doringer reflects. ‘It’s a cross-pollination between roleplaying, and dancing, used by marginalised communities to assume certain social roles and positions frequently denied to them’.
So, when does raving, and dancing, become just that, a frivolous act of recreational drug use and frenetic dancing, and when can it start accumulating a degree of political meaning? For Doringer, a dance floor reaches its true, transformative potential when ‘the composition is that of like-minded people with the same intentions of what they’re trying to achieve on the floor’, he tells us. His research makes it explicitly clear that raving, as it stands, does not inherently equal ‘resistance’. Dancing becomes an act of resistance when it starts subverting and challenging societal and constitutional conventions. It is the people, oftentimes marginalised communities, that prescribe and imbue a space with ideas of liberation and emancipation; a cultural currency that transcends boundaries.
Post-Soviet dances at Bassiani
Reflecting on his own nightlife experiences as a teenager in '90s Belgrade, Doringer expands on how they ‘utilised student protests and dancing as a form of resistance against the ex-President Slobodan Milošević’. This came at a tumultuous time marked by the bombing of Belgrade in 1999 when NATO sent an array of bombs across Serbia. ‘There was a club, INDUSTRIJA we would go to, where the sirens would run in tandem with the thumping of techno music’, Doringer reflects on his personal experience. ‘It was also a ritual we practised that deafened the possibility of death at that time; it silenced it, even though it was constantly breathing down our necks. At the same time, it was a middle finger to the abusing power of both Miloševic and NATO.’
For Doringer, in the face of crises, dancing became a choice against isolation, offering an alternative way of opposing a dangerous and draconian regime. While the dancing may not have been explicitly political, it became a conscious act of opposition within a society in turmoil; a fight that expressed their criticism in different ways, transcending bureaucracy.
Another potent example of Doringer’s research is that around Bassiani Club: the techno darling still shaking off its post-Soviet oppression. The club has two rooms with distinct personalities: there’s Bassiani itself, the bunker with its striking spotlights and jaw-swinging, eye-fluttering and grin-inducing sound. Then upstairs is Horoom (the name comes from a traditional dance), a more intimate space and one that is overly queer in a country where Orthodox Christian values prevail. ‘At Bassiani, there’s a new generation of Georgians that grew up in a post-Soviet country after the war’, Doringer reflects, explaining how they ‘dance together, collectively and in synchronicity, to imagine how they could coexist in daily life’.
The post-Soviet distraughtness also manifested amongst Georgians in May 2019, when thousands of ravers gathered on Rustaveli Avenue, the epicentre of Tbilisi, to protest a police raid on two of the city's renowned clubs. Spearheaded by the White Noise Movement and backed by techno communities globally, the demonstrators advocated for a shift in Georgia's drug policy. The powerful Ravelution brought thousands congregating on the square amongst gun-toting riot cops, dancing in synchronicity to wide-eyed and industrial techno.
In Ukraine, club culture also played an important role last decade and shows openness towards EU values and participatio. Even now, in times of war, clubs like K41 and are creating space for people to dance and be together during war times.
'The sirens would run in tandem with the thumping of techno music'
In retrospect: How the post-COVID pipeline shifted club culture
Another striking example of the revelation of political layers of dance is that of COVID. The ever-changing conundrum of the post-COVID pipeline dramatically reshaped the landscape of nightlife and the underground scene as we know it, imposing increasingly difficult challenges for partygoers and club spaces alike. ‘Social distancing measures, lockdowns, and restrictions deadlocked us from moving freely’, Doringer tells us, explaining that if COVID showed us something, it’s that ‘our bodies are very much still governed by high-towered bureaucracies. Intimacy, movement and communal gatherings like clubbing took an irreparable blow’, he adds.
‘I think clubbing now is a reaction to finally being able to go out again, and not having been able to have that kind of communal experience on the dance floor’, Doringer explains. However, within this shift, he still has his reservations about getting back to regular, scheduled party programming. ‘I’m very suspicious of going out nowadays because there’s such a polarised, divisive discourse around politics and voting’, he tells us nervously, disclosing how it renders him ‘hyper-aware about moving through spaces with someone who might disapprove of the very fabric of what makes me, me’. So, how do we rekindle the communal experience that defines these spaces?
‘There’s this hyper-awareness in the current atmosphere of nightlife’, Doringer reveals, referring to the sudden call for diversity and an intensified focus on the matter caused by the upheaval of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, and earlier the refugees crises of 2013-2014. This shift has sparked crucial conversations aimed at authenticating the origins of music, and assessing who’s represented fairly, and who’s not. ‘Clubs need to rethink how they treat music, because music has always been a culture of politics’, he adds.
This rethinking is made difficult by the division that occurred in the dance climate after the pandemic; a division between entertainment-connected dance and urgency-driven dance. The plug might have been pulled out of speakers momentarily, but as soon as it came back on, nightlife found itself under the looming threat of big finance. While the die-hard ravers (at times purists) want to keep the club from being tampered with by individuals who don’t use these spaces as conduits for self-actualisation, they see other parties, made up of big finance, private equity firms, and conglomerates (also known as ‘business techno’), trying to commodify these spaces by using them as lucrative pipelines for younger generations that, respectfully, don’t imbue the nightlife with meaning. Electronic music has entered the saturated discourse of pop culture, and alas, it’s here to stay.
In conclusion, dance, clubbing, and music have consistently held sociopolitical significance, rejecting norms and providing a space for self-expression without fear of reprisals. In that moment when the bass sweeps beneath your feet, and you synchronise your movements with the collective, imagination transforms into reality. The more immersed you become in the beat, the deeper you journey into introspection.
And much like nature's ability to find its course through the cracks and crevices, the persistent spirit of the underground scene mirrors this resilience. Despite the hurdles and hardships brought about by societal shifts, the underground scene endures as a testament to the communal nature it stands by. It is safe to say that those who dance, move, and those who move, inevitably change.
Future Exhibitions Curated by Bogomir Doringer
Doringer’s research of dance and its political layers has continued over the last ten years in which 'I Dance Alone' was further expanded by exploring different dance floors, while the artist also investigated the topic through the curation of various exhibitions.
As a follow-up to the exhibition ‘NO DANCING ALLOWED’ in 2022 in Vienna, ‘NO DANCING ALLOWED 2’ at Garage Rotterdam is Doringer’s most recent exhibition which will open this Thursday. It aims to explore dance rituals in times of global constraints like the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing wars, and recent bans on raving and protesting in Italy. The exhibition dives into the historical interplay between body politics and dance, unravelling the threads that connect them and asking for thinking reflections on the moving spirit of dance within this evolving narrative. The exhibition brings together nightlife and club mainstays such as the co-founders of Bassiani Club in the work ‘Dance or Die’ and researchers Chiara Baldini and Rafael Kozdron with the video work ‘Politics of Ecstasy’.
