Figure 1. In/Out. Photo Credit: Opashona Ghosh (2023).
Windows on the Dance Floor
Independent researcher
<http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.15>
Figure 1. In/Out. Photo Credit: Opashona Ghosh (2023).
The dance floor is an interface between private and public life: a space both for escaping and confronting. The window, a glass surface, has material qualities that are textural and temperate, interacting with the physical space of the dance floor and its surroundings. Both visually and physically reflective, it alters our optical and aural perception when interacting with it. We see ourselves reflected in its materiality, cold glass reacting with collective body heat and breath to create condensation, a communal body of water.
Under the guise of concealment from the outside world, we often overlook our relationship with the exterior in spaces of dancing. As a fellow dancer and DJ, I’ve seen ways that windows on dance floors can affect our experiences; their function as a threshold of space; their materiality; their practical uses and what all of this might mean for our perception of ourselves as well as the collective dance floor. What does a window on a dance floor facilitate?
The framed window presents a gateway, framing the internal and external. Separating, containing and creating a stage for possibility, often playing with ideas of virtual reality and illusion. The window frames the outside as much as it frames the inside. In South London, Avalon Café’s dance floor on Surrey Canal Road frames the train tracks. In Amsterdam, the upstairs dance floor in De School’s Muzieklokaal frames a display of the motorway, a mirage of moving cars through rising steam conjoins a communion of body, machine and heat. The windows at Fold in Canning Town are fitted with external light, often giving the illusion of false sunlight, as well as allowing sunlight in.
Windows—Dan Loane, (2024)
Reflected in the glass, bodies contort into one. The body of water rolling down the surface, a communion of breath and mass. A collective body of water. A place where incorporeal bodies meet, not a community, but a communion.
The body curls and dips around the steel frame, weightless. A vision/ghost occupying an otherworldly space. The lightness and opacity of the glass, the lack of physical presence that vanishes at any second. Shapes integrate and fragment, passing and becoming one again. Imagine the framed window as a stage, both for the interior and panoramic exterior, the other and outside—our reflective internal.
There is a simultaneity between the inside and outside when you look beyond the architecture of the dance floor, the performance of being in the club space and how we co-exist in a new way. Bodies and machines, trains and motorways, journeying and meeting. The corporeal vanishes into the panoramic exteriority through the window.
Figure 2. Reddit Discussion Screenshot. Photo credit: Ruth Hughes (2023).
When there are no windows there are phone screens, metal fixtures, tiles. There’s no fixed way to participate in a dance floor, but euphoria is often associated with the ultimate dance floor experience; this desire is reflected when searching for your euphoric self in these spaces and materials. Assimilating your ideal self and your real self, there can often be two separate experiences of the corporeal and the gateway world of a foggy distortion.
Watching and being watched plays a role in our enjoyment of the dance floor and in our interactions with other dancers. The window provides a layer for our bodies to be viewed through or protected with, its glass pane creates a threshold of separation, a cover, camouflage or filter. Seeing the dance floor through the window from outside before entering can create assumptions and expectations. Whilst some spaces welcome this, others challenge vigilance via shutters, small gaping holes filtering the internal and external from one another.
Figure 3. Morning Sun in the Old Union Building. Photo cred: Ruth Hughes (2018).
In opening a window, you bring the fresh air into a space and bridge worlds.
Figure 4. Morning Sun in the Old Union Building. Photo Credit: Ruth Hughes (2018)
Sunshine brought a lucidity to the dance floor. As the sun rose, illuminating the room, we noticed the dust that was converging in the air around us. We opened the windows. The building had previously been home to a worker’s union and was in the process of being redeveloped into single room apartments for individuals looking to get onto the property ladder. The sun allowed us to see the markings on the floors, allowing us to realise what these rooms were materialising into. Something about the possibilities and fragility of space was surprising, the fantasy of the environment was completely replaced. There was a clarity that came with the morning light.
Deep into a 24 hour Unfold party and the sun sharply hits the hot air through gaps in the fixed shutters. Peering through, eye pressed to the window, it’s not actually the sun but a lighting rig fitted onto the outside of the building. The augmented reality of the dance floor becoming a vessel for time travel.
FOLD Window Field Recording, Hughes (2024)
The thrum of a kick drum moves through the glass panes of every window in my house, the windows in the smoking area, the passing cars.
The window is a shapeshifting vessel for potential and altering perception, a framing of fantasy and reality on the dance floor, and hosts a materiality that brings bodies together.
Ruth Hughes is a sound artist, DJ and composer based in London. She recently took part in a Sound and Music residency at Somerset House.
Hughes, Ruth. 2023. “FOLD Window Field Recording”. Soundcloud, 0:10.
<https://on.soundcloud.com/fSgTLsnBMJBDbNgy7>.
Loane, Dan. 2024. “Windows—Dan Loane”. Soundcloud, 5:36.
<https://on.soundcloud.com/KTrk9v6XqTwhmwr47>.