Raving

Raving is based on McKenzie Warks’ book of the same name. In it, this theorist and lecturer studies techno-music dance parties as a culturological phenomenon and as a personal need, urge, total liberation. She writes about rave as a collective ritual that is cathartic and can replace religion. This is about thinking with the body, about letting the rhythm and pulse take control. Raving is not an escape from the body, but a deeply physical form of thinking, including theory, inscribed into the flesh. At the same time, it’s also a dissociation, a fissure in capitalist time, a ketamine hole, a break when the body is no longer productive and exploited, but hedonistic and carefree. In this hole, time flows differently; it becomes layered, stretched, sticky, and the sense of “before” and “after” fades. The place of a rave creates a possibility to search for closeness, danger/safety, fleeting crushes and physical contacts.

 The production will be conceived as an immersion event, as a theatre reimagination of a rave, within which scenes originate – and dive back into – that are primarily physical, and where language and speech are impossible and unnecessary because of the music. Instead, the sweaty, exhausted, stoned, lustful body speaks. The production will, just like McKenzie Wark’s autofictional and autotheoric book, look at the rave through the lens of the queer community, for whom, just like for raves, autonomous underground spaces are of key importance. The event will develop along the music guidelines by DJ msn gf, who will steer the happening live and also interfere with it. Is collective ecstasy possible also within the theatre illusion, devoid of the haze of substances, anonymity, the haven of late nights, and the already initiated crowd that shares the way of thinking?