I can’t recall what song was playing, but I’d like to attempt to capture a recent moment when I was completely flooded with love. A pure moment of bliss, moving my body, in my own world, with not an ounce of self-consciousness, and yet feeling the love of (and love for) every single human in the room.
The reason for this experience? I was out at my first house music dance night and concert in a good long while.
Dancing is core to my being. It’s a mind-body-spirit activity for me. While I was pulled out of ballet before my first recital (mom couldn’t afford costumes for both my sister and myself) and never fully recovered from wanting to be a ballerina, some of the gracefulness learned has stayed with me. In high school, I was part of an Armenian youth dance troupe and performed my cultural dances on church basement stages, once with the legendary Armenian-Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh present. The lockdowns of the pandemic changed a lot, but I picked up a fun pop dance class on Mondays and remembered that there’s a body attached to this big brain, and it loves to move to music!
I’ve gotten up the courage to go out dancing twice since the pandy began, once outdoors in the daytime (with largely hip-hop sets) for our annual team outing to Bastid’s BBQ. I also saw Scratch Bastid play in Prince Edward County in a well-ventilated barn, which was a throwdown for my friend Daniela’s birthday. But in a sweaty downtown nightclub with multiple DJs and touring performers? It’s been about 3-4 years. So last weekend, when the opportunity presented itself, I decided to get out of my sweats and into wide-leg pants and sneakers to chase one of my favourite vibes of life.
I can’t recall my first-ever dance floor because to do so would mean defining “dance floor.” If you’ve spent any time with babies and toddlers, you know that music gets them moving to the rhythm automatically. We, humans, are hard-wired to dance when the rhythm or beat moves us. Dance has always been an integral part of my culture and identity, so “when did you start” is an impossible question. Was it an Armenian New Year’s Eve dinner and dance party (bara-hantess) at our local community centre? Was it that epic Armenian wedding on Captain John’s boat, when I was allowed to wear makeup for the first time, and my sister and I got dizzy to “You spin me, right round baby, right round. Like a record baby, right round, round, round…”? Or maybe a random Catholic church basement or school gym in the early 90s, with a real DJ surrounded by crates of records playing “Everybody, Everybody”?
At some point, I grew up, and the dance floors shifted to abandoned warehouses and nightclubs. After seeing a segment on The New Music about the UK’s Acid House scene, I became obsessed with whatever early house music I could get my hands on (I have a funny story about my first time hearing the song “French Kiss” by L’il Louis that I’ll save for another time). Around age 18, I became involved in rave culture, embracing techno, jungle, drum & bass, tribal house, and the various iterations of dance music that evolved throughout the 1990s. As a Scarborough first-gen kid with strict Armenian parents, I wasn’t actually allowed to go to raves, but I’d find sneaky ways to experience them anyway. That which is forbidden often calls to us good girls the loudest.
House music has its roots in Black and Queer communities in Chicago (big love to Frankie Knuckles) and later Detroit, London and New York before spreading to the world. But the underground dance music scene in Toronto in the early 1990s looked a lot like my Scarborough Catholic school: Black and Filipino kids mixed with European-white kids and Anglos. With so many of us first-gen and immigrant kids being pressured to homogenize in our cultures of origin at home, dance floors offered a way to create a shared culture with the kids we were growing up with on the outside.
What was fresh was my exposure to gay and trans folks. Queer culture as an expression of humanity wasn’t quite open or accepted in the Scarborough Christian cultural kitchen sink I spent my time in. The vibrancy of the 90s dance scene subculture meant every day was Halloween, and flamboyance of any kind was celebrated. Suddenly I was friends with queer kids (mostly gay men) in a way that would not be accepted back in our judgy, homophobic Scarborough enclave or my Armenian church crowd. On the dance floor, a connection could be fostered through complimenting the cool outfits we’d created, someone’s incredible dance moves, and chatting about the shared love of a DJ’s perfect set. Everyone was welcome. Even now, I struggle to articulate how special it was to be in an environment that was so full of love.
We were all sweaty, broke, and cruddy, so it was a judgment-free zone of folks trying to connect to joy, one set at a time. We’d sit on grungy floors and share snacks, water, and laps to nap on. On the dance floors of the early 90s, I found acceptance and love in a way I’d never experienced before. It was common to hug or hold hands (in a very non-sexual way). OK, some of that was fuelled by folks doing MDMA, mushrooms or acid. But more than that, rave culture guaranteed a giant space full of people who connected through 120 beats per minute reverberating from their soles to their souls. Communal resonance.
Eventually, I began to turn my love of the rave scene into a business (that immigrant/first-gen instinct to turn any passion into cash LOL) and helped put on two raves in the early 90s under the name AcmE Productions. (The A was for Acid, the E was for Ecstasy LOL) My sketchy but creative high school boyfriend was a hustler and started a hotline you’d call to learn where the raves were happening that night, and he decided we could make some money hosting raves since we already had a strong network and marketing channel. Tickets for the parties were purchased at head shops, record shops, and sometimes skater stores. You’d go to Nathan Phillips Square and hop on a bus or find a guy with a map to the location. These locations were often in parts of the city that were still industrial and had buildings with no weekend purpose. A giant old fire station in Liberty Village, or warehouses on Eastern or Landsdowne, old curling halls. I once attended a rave in a warehouse where someone had parked a van inside so that people could play Mario Kart in the back. Such fun times!
At the big raves, there were rooms for different styles of music, and if you didn’t like one DJ, you could pop over to the next space and vibe to something completely different. There were also chill-out rooms, medics and police on site, and markets selling all kinds of things, from food and drink to t-shirts and temporary tattoos. For a time, I made some side cash buying candy wholesale at Costco and selling it marked up to very high kids with the munchies. I recall Sour Keys being the hottest sellers. I remember one animated conversation with an adorable young woman whose arms and hands bore the signs of thalidomide poisoning in utero. At the end of our conversation, she tried to sell me acid. I was surprised and delighted that she shook my biases. Why shouldn’t she get hers? That’s what raves were like!
I wasn’t big on the drugs scene because I often had to drive home to the suburbs for curfew and would miss the best part of the raves anyway. Being high on psychedelics and living in your parents’ home don’t mix. Since I had to be home by 2 a.m., I’d leave just as things got good. Sometimes, I’d wake up super early and sneak back out again to catch the morning residue. (Trust me when I say you don’t want to see the end of a rave in daylight unless you were there for most of it.) Sometimes I’d get a friend to say I was sleeping over so I could see a certain DJ and have any part of this community I loved. At some point, I got a job writing reviews for a rave magazine for a guy named Chris and his brother. I remember they lived in Brampton, and I got paid maybe $25 per review (plus my free rave ticket). If you were a kid with some hustle and an idea, you could make stuff happen back then. And it was ALL ANALOG — save for the music.
Dance culture in 90s Toronto was bliss for a time. Maybe it wasn’t so intentional, but I’d like to think it was Gen X’s answer to how this cultural mosaic could not just co-exist but learn to love each other and collectively heal. The rave scene gave us that. I understand now how somatic the experience was and how the psychedelics were opening us up to new consciousness and the BIG LOVE, two things that are now being used to heal trauma in psychology circles.
The scene didn’t start to go sour until a certain kind of man heard about these spaces where young women in big pants and crop tops could move freely, fully embodied, without fear. And when meth and coke started to take over, and these new characters emerged, the spaces sometimes became predatory and dangerous. After lots of bad press, police presence increased. Toronto is puritanical at the best of times, and the city did not care for swaths of young people dancing freely while on psychedelic substances.
Word got out. More kids wanted to experience the movement. The scene became more mainstream, with more sophisticated promoters realizing that moving the dancing to clubs meant money. And with alcohol sales, the vibe changed. As the years went on, as those warehouses slowly became lofts or film studios, my high school boyfriend turned out to be a serial cheater, and my love affair with raves came crashing down. I couldn’t be at raves anymore for fear of running into him. I gave up and went to euro-dance clubs instead, never quite enjoying the “let’s do shots while scantily dressed” scene in the same way. I became a binge drinker to tolerate my discomfort. But that’s a story for another day.
But oh, that feeling of losing oneself on the floor. Of feet moving to repetitive 4/4 rhythmic beats or that build-up of synthesizers and bass in the body until you have no choice but to release. The grounding force of being a part of a subculture, a community of folks looking to find themselves through their bodies, was magical. And years later, when I found myself single again, I discovered a group of now-friends who still chased DJs and perfect sets (shout out to Team Dance Pants). Rave culture was alive and well, even if its patrons and participants were over 40. And the best part is, now that I live my life largely sober and fully embodied, I know I can go and find myself in the moment instead of losing myself in it. Now dancing is more like a meditation of unifying myself and experiencing community than rooted in the need to escape. Cathartic. Healing.
I’m writing this paragraph a week after everything you’ve read until now. I’m home alone, sick but recovering, and I’m pretty certain I caught a second round of Covee while dancing (and, of course, none of the other 10 people I was with got it). I’ve spent much of this week completely alone and contemplating whether it was worth it, given the cost of being ill afterwards. And here’s where I’ve landed: Life is lived by experiencing it. As someone who is very careful and still masks in public places, I’ve said no to a lot of things over the past three years. What is the lesson in getting Covee again? I don’t have anything wise to say. It just is. This is the time we are living in. Our governments chose capitalism over the common good. And now, we make choices as individuals. We have collectively failed the marshmallow test, so now we must learn how to live again, and it’s gonna be different for everyone. There’s risk in every waking moment. Experiencing pleasure is a meditation in itself, one I ascribe to. I took a risk. Here we are. I’m choosing to stay present and not wallow in guilt about what I “should” or “shouldn’t” have done.
So I’m grateful. Grateful I got to experience that love. Grateful that this bout of Covee wasn’t as bad as last summer’s dance with it. Grateful that I didn’t get anyone else sick because I stayed home as a precaution (and because Rasheed is so careful about Covee that he insisted on a walk after learning I was out in a crowd, lol). Grateful that I live in a country where I’ve had four doses of a modern miracle to protect me. Grateful that friends brought me soup and tea and that Rasheed shovelled my walk and delivered my groceries. Grateful that I can buy high-quality masks, so I can briefly see my kids for an air hug. Grateful that I can type this while a sunbeam floods this home I’m so lucky to have.
See you on a dancefloor soon, I hope.
XO, Nadine