This Place is My Place. Sunrise [Total Recall], West Indian Centre, Leeds, UK. Saturday 22nd March 2014
University of Leeds (UK)
DOI: 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.02.09
It has been nearly three full months since the gathering of the Sunrise tribe and anticipation builds for the coming of this event—a celebration of spring equinox and the start of something new. We stand here on the cusp of lighter nights, brighter days and the promise of good things to come. We have survived the winter and the summer now lies within our reach. Sunrise is, and always will be, an event. It is marked on our calendars, both the ones on our desks and the ones we carry in our heads and hearts, as a special occasion like a birthday, a wedding or a christening. Other commitments are moved and rearranged to ensure the path is clear either side of that 9 hour slot in which we invest so much.
In readiness we make our preparations. We liaise with friends. We determine our travel plans and discuss the sleeping arrangements for post-party rejuvenations. We decide what to wear; what to take with us; what to eat during the day before and what to have stocked in the house ready for our return. We plot and we hatch and we conspire to make this... The Best One Yet.
And that’s why those 3 hours before the start are
so
damn
hard for me.
As a child I never dealt well with big occasions. The heightened expectation and towering hopes for greatness crippled me with anxiety to the point where it became easier to check out emotionally than bear the brunt of crushing disappointment. These days, before every big event, the same feelings threaten to overwhelm me. The black dog sits by my side staring me down. The pattern is the same but now I have learnt to ride it (just about) and go through my pre-party rituals safe in the knowledge that this sensation will pass, in time. The clock ticks on and brings us closer to mission blast off—expectancy rises, heart beats faster, everything in place, check face in the mirror, music to get us in the swing, not long now, tick tock, tick tock. Doorbell—we’re off!
Friends arrive, drinks flow, glasses chink together. Laughter. Stories. More laughter. Sitting swapping tales together, catching up quickly as the time approaches when we leave the house and the time for talk will be over. Taxi arrives. Front door slams shut. Cold night air—it’s not summer yet, remember. The heating’s on full in the cab as we race through the suburbs of Leeds towards the West Indian Centre, a community centre a couple of miles North of the city but home tonight to one of the UK’s longest running psytrance nights, Sunrise.
We arrive,
and things slow down.
I relax.
The flat roofed, red brick building and its desolate car park that sits amidst the run down, urban sprawl of this industrial Northern city is hardly awe inspiring and yet arriving at its doors never fails to excite. For what is contained within is extraordinary. Sunrise is special. It’s a pulsating, diverse, underground world that opens its arms to anyone who wants to come along for the ride and sets itself apart from daily routine, convention and restriction. This is the North’s very own brand of psychedelic alchemy. It’s not a club where anything goes—far from it. This party has its own codes of courtesy, where people’s behaviour matters, where dancing is an expression of being part of a body of people who look out for each other. This is an event curated by a team of people who have nurtured this creation over the course of eighteen years. Sunrise has come of age and we are here to celebrate.
The first hour at Sunrise is always magical and tonight is no different. It’s a whirlwind of greetings, hugs, hellos, smiles, catch-ups. Familiar faces everywhere I look. The space, beautifully decorated with such attention to detail, setting the scene of our play as we begin to shed the stresses and strains of the week just past. This is our reimagining of the community centre, a psychedelic playground for over excited grown ups who want to kick loose—no wonder we don’t want to give this up any time soon! That’s not to say the party is populated only by people of “a certain age”. Sunrise is truly intergenerational. You only need to do a quick scan of the crowd to see that. Its commitment to moving forward and keeping things fresh is an ethos that keeps the youngsters coming through the door whilst the veterans renew their season ticket and cash in their frequent flier tokens.
This place is my place. A deep breath in, a strong surge of belonging and a smile from ear to ear as I survey the dance floor from the raised spot at the back of the main room—a perfect vantage point from which to appreciate the network of friends that we see sporadically but in magnificent intensity. In this 9 hours we pack in a lot of living, squeezing as much out of these fleeting moments as we can before the morning air sucks us back outside and into our taxis. Stop. Don’t think that far ahead. Come back to now.
Big claps on the back and heartfelt embraces that nearly squeeze the life out of me. A burst of conversation carried out quickly at the start of the night in the first flurry of reconnecting. Not much in the words themselves, but lurking behind in the shadows, a whole tapestry of meaning, a shared story and a friendship that started on a dance floor some 6 years ago and takes another step forward every time we meet on this stage. No need to say more, not for now. And anyway, the tunes of Mr Chukkel drown us out and prevent us from going further.
Tonight we are here with new friends who have already become part of our story. They’re all seasoned party-goers but it’s been many years since they visited the West Indian Centre, or a club like it. Without a minute’s hesitation two of them take to the dance floor with another staying back, watching from a distance as he tries to remember the times when he was in the thick of it all. The thrill of hearing that familiar sound transports the first two back to parties gone by and pulls them by an invisible UV thread skipping to the centre of the cavernous room like kids. Arms raised, hips loose, smiles so wide that the years fall away. They look over their shoulders at me and we share a look that says, this feels like home.
And before we know it, the night moves into its next phase. The music takes hold and the hours slip by as the event unfolds and the crowd meld together, constant motion that is raw energy at the front, and in the centre, where we all take our turn and put our shift in. The music drives us on and we drive the party. Forwards and forever. This space, this time, our time. Shining beams of light pick out fragments of faces and the night becomes pixelated, grasped as tiny chunks of information, and reassembled somewhere in another part of my brain. Kaleidoscopic patterns break the night into a thousand colours that dance and swirl before my eyes, making me dizzy but enjoying the ride. Tonight my skin is warm. My bare arms and shoulders feel the glow of the room, heat generated by dancing and laughing and moving together. I am utterly alone in my dance and, at the same time, bonded to the rest in rhythm and tempo and heart beat.
Tonight there is reason to dance. Hard times require furious dancing, so the saying goes. Close friends talk to me briefly about illness, diagnosis, recovery, relapse and the possibility of future tragedy that casts a long and constant shadow over day-to-day living. We share these stories fleetingly before losing ourselves back in the music, moving off with a wave of the hand before the emotion bubbles over and swamps us all. For some of us, this is why we are here, to wrap ourselves up in the warmth of a patchwork crowd as if it were a well worn and much loved blanket. We move to the music so that we don’t have to stop for more than a minute to remind ourselves of what lies waiting for us when reality bites and we bump back down to earth with some crumpled fliers in our pocket and a set of half formed memories. This is musical respite for some, a chance to be immersed in a world where talk is not the primary mode of communication, where we can let our bodies take over and tell us what to do. This is a place where we can take a holiday from ourselves, allowing music and dance to patch up our wounds before going back into battle again.
I realise I’m staring into space. I’ve stopped smiling. A woman dancing near me catches my eye, throws her arms around me and hugs me hard. Her touch is like a lightning bolt that powers straight through me. I wonder if she knows what precision timing energy she casts and how generous she is in the giving of it. I think about telling her but she is back to dancing, arms thrust straight into the air, eyes up to the ceiling and she is spinning with pure joy, like a child running down a steep hill squealing with delight as the momentum takes her feet.
Suddenly I’m restless. The noise and thrust of the full on psytrance in the main room becomes too much for me. The sheer volume of people oppresses me and the smell of sweating bodies is overpowering. So I set off in search of new tunes in the back room, the “multidimensional mashup” of the Beats Bizarre. The shift of gear to something altogether more funky makes me smile and I find my rhythm again. Here the atmosphere is lighter, the music less industrial, the faces less fixed, the dancing less relentless. I’m happier here but can’t help feeling half of me has been left in the main room and I feel a constant pull, deep in my gut, back to the vortex next door. I stick with it for a while and, here in the Beats Bizarre, I jig around with old mates, share life histories with new ones and slot together the pieces of a friendship jigsaw that has been slowly forming in this place for over ten years. The set is never complete. There will always be missing pieces, some parts of the puzzle carry more meaning than others, but you can still make out the full picture if you squint hard enough.
Before I know it, it’s approaching 4 am and only two hours to go before the end. And so the
slide
into
the
third
phase.
A final chance to squeeze all I can into those last two hours. Tired now but I need to experience all that is on offer as this particular Sunrise marks the last indoor club night for us before the start of the festival season. With that thought, the outdoor beckons. I grab my coat and go in search of sustenance, a cup of sweet tea from the Psychedelic Breakfast, a covered marquee that sits in the yard outside offering a welcome chill out space for smokers, loungers and talkers. Picking my way through the tangle of bodies, I find a bench to sit on and realise just how sore my feet are from endurance dancing over the past 6 hours. I rest and lean on my partner, chat to the friendly faces either side, hunt out lost tobacco for a stranger, snuggle into my coat and recharge my batteries ready for that final push through to dawn.
When 6 o’clock strikes, I’m ready for home. The shutters are down. Goodbyes are brief. We head out from the main room towards the front door and, like an unannounced house guest, the grey chill of the morning greets us. It’s daylight. I didn’t expect it but it marks a turning point in our party calendar. No more leaving a club in darkness. From now on we dance until daylight. Thankfully, the taxi arrives in minutes to stop our shivers and, as we ride home in reverse order through the empty streets of Sunday morning, I think about the story of our night, our motley patchwork of friendships brought together in this place once more to dance furiously for all our own reasons and none. And as we climb higher out of the city, there it is—the strongest, deepest, most orange sunrise over Leeds you will ever see, the prize that reminds us momentous new beginnings happen every day.
Thanks to Ed Tangent and the rest of the Sunrise crew for putting together such a special place for us to come together. Gratitude to the staff at the West Indian Centre for keeping the door with such grace. Thanks also to my friends for sharing the party with me and for letting me write about our experiences. You know who you are.
Alice O’Grady is Associate Professor in Applied Performance at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, UK. Her specialism lies within the field of interactive performance, underground club cultures, festivals and play. She has worked on a number of collaborative, interdisciplinary projects that investigate varying modes of participation and engagement within a variety of social and playful contexts. She is Section Editor for Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture.