An article forwarded by 5R Vancouver regular Rebekkah Harvey. Dance for us in this community is more than a 'hipster diversion,' of course, but I guess this is further evidence that some kind of shift into deeper embodiment is underway ...
The new rave: Dancing to the beat of their own drummer
Vancouver Sun, Saturday, April 26, 2008
In what looked like an improbable dance scene from a zombie movie, nearly 1,000 people gathered recently in New York to gyrate en masse as part of the latest hipster diversion: the silent rave.
The peculiar social trend, now making its way across Canada, involves the flash congregation of large groups of people in a public place to dance to the beat of their own MP3 players. The startling result is a sea of bodies moving in sundry rhythms to a soundtrack of silence.
"We all want to be part of something ... but at the same time, we also like to differentiate ourselves," says Jonah Berger, a University of Pennsylvania Wharton School professor who has studied identity signals within social groups. "This movement appeals to both those motivations: you're in a place with other people, yet only listening to what you want to hear."
Berger describes the events as a kind of "flash mob 2.0." The briefly hip cultural phenomenon earlier this decade involved organizing meetings for hundreds, even thousands, of people in a public place at a specific time -- say, 6:53 or 3:19 -- who would then perform unusual activities such as a mass chicken dance.
Although silent raves (also called silent discos or mobile clubbing) have had scenesters under their spell for years in the United Kingdom -- an event at London's Victoria Station last April drew about 4,000 dancers -- it wasn't until recently that the trend began making a splash this side of the pond.
Silent raves are currently in the works in at least two-dozen North American cities, including Edmonton, Kelowna, Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary. Nearly 1,200 people have confirmed plans to attend the Calgary event, which is planned for May 10 at a secret location to be revealed to the guest list via Facebook 24 hours in advance. Another 1,900 people say they might attend.
