The Ethnography

Sometimes, I wonder if I have a comfort zone

I showed up to REQUIEM dripping in handcrafted red and black, new hair, new perfume and new date to a new location revealed to me only an hour prior. The hype had started weeks prior. My contact, a fire dancer for the event, sent me snaps from their tiny bathtub trying to dye the wigs for the event less than 24 hours prior.

The stress and tension of planning falls away when faced with something so novel as… glow sticks. The co-ordinates dropped at 10pm, so my designated driver smeared nail polish over the steering wheel as I downed two bottles of soju and we were met with glow sticks. A long, snaking path that gradually emerged as we stepped closer. Down across the side of a bridge, through tall grass, across a single concrete block across a river, up against chain link fence. A slow congregation of individuals making a small pilgrimage to something they couldn’t quite imagine just yet. And then we reached the field, a large sweeping field under all-encompassing moonlight. And on the precipice of my vision, a looming building covered in graffiti and rubble. 

I wish I could show you the faces; the wide-eyed, child-like joy that comes with something you wouldn’t have been able to describe just minutes before. It was a symphony of deep excitement and shared disbelief that I didn’t think you could really find in adulthood.

I’m historically not that co-ordinated. Between my own chronic pain, the drinks and the dark, I managed to get my legs caught in a fallen chain fence. Falling in a club is embarrassing and it might cloud the rest of the night, falling here was kinda a given. The journey had been a little odd and tedious, scuffs and scars would be a silly reminder of the night for a while. It’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed the simple childishness of scraping my knees, getting up again, and having an incredible time. There were hands extended to help me out, words were shared about the various battle scars on our stockings, and we finally made it through the door.

We could hear the music back from the street, but here it was an all-consuming feeling of being present. Spinning on my heels, I watched the room turn with blurs of red light, faces drawn on the wall with black paint, and large text that wasn’t decipherable on every wall. I’ve put my foot in a culture I don’t know the first thing about starting to understand. There’s no resources, texts, webpages or blogs. So often we are expected to know the basics to understand a culture before we are allowed to really enjoy it. You watch ‘Pulp Fiction’, you read the classics, you at least need to see ‘Hamilton’ once. Not here, not in the slightest. All that there is to it, is to let the world melt away.

I’ve experienced ideas like this in Origame Digital’s ‘Umurangi Generation’ (2020) and ZA/UM’s ‘Disco Elysium’ (2019). A rave to let the end of the world fall away for just a moment before reality hits. I’ve never been in the center of it. Never really understood why you’d put an amnesiac alcoholic cop or commercial photographer faced with death by Kaiju in a rave. But here, I think I fully understood why these deeply important works would dip their toes into this culture. Surrounded by new and old cultures where I cannot begin understand the start and end of it-

There’s these two girls that came up to us, we became their checkpoint for the night. All four of us were not completely aware of what we were in for. It was at this moment we started to realise how incredibly small this culture is, how exclusive. An expectation that you knew someone, or you were someone. We met multiple people. By day she’s a barista. He’s a designer. They’re a retail worker. She knows the DJ. He’s doing the sound design. They’re sleeping with the performer. I fell in love very quickly with the optionality of conversation. Screaming over the music isn’t ideal, but losing yourself very very deeply in the atmosphere is.

My watch had accumulated 14,000 steps between 12 and 2.30am. Dancing. I’m accustomed to clubbing where, every once in a while, you hear the break between the track and stop jumping only to stare awkwardly into someone's eyes while the music tries to pick up momentum then starts spinning ‘Pudam Pudam’. I was waiting for it. It never came. It was 14,000 steps of letting the music let everything melt away.

There’s a photo somewhere of me pressed up against the bathroom wall looking into the camera with a black lip, red eyeshadow and ripped up red stockings giggling. Somewhere in the moment that was taken I remember thinking I’m back to where I should be. Scraped knees and black lipstick smeared across my face. I think there’s photos of me as a kid, very similar to the one taken of me that night.

I saw the world melt away.

So yes, there is community. It’s small and sweet, it looks after each other. It also reaches out to you the next morning to like your post and send you an invite to the next event. But it was mainly escapism. A glowing fairy trail in the tall grass guides you to a party in a small hall at the edge of the world. A hall where the trials and tribulations of your day melt away as music and light floods the space in its entirety. I felt wrong writing this all down, as if I’ve dispelled the magician's secrets and the cure for anxiety is just really loud music. But the story they construct, the tales it makes you tell, the feeling you need to relive. It’s like a small hole in the world where all other noise has dissipated so it’s you and the music. The world has already melted away.

References

Origame Digital. (2021, May 19). Umurangi Generation [Video Game]. Origame Digital.

ZA/UM. (2019, October 15). Disco Elysium [Video Game]. ZA/UM.