Missed Connections: Affective Anatomy of a Night Out

This project tells the story, hour-by-hour, of a night out at a techno rave in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). It starts with us at 9:30pm the night of and follows us, staying up through the night until the sunrise, and riding home with a feeling of something. The aim of this project is to retain the feeling of lostness that a loud room and a sea of⁠—chemical, organic, energetic⁠—bodies impart. In recounting the various encounters, starts, transfers, that made up the night, it explores the circulation of affect through and around the dance floor. What happens in a dark, loud, crowded room, when experience meets its fringes? Where does the self go when it joins the community? Inspired by Kathleen Stewart’s attention to the circulation of public feelings, motions, shock, banalities, the ‘ordinary affects’ which constitute a life on a personal and collective level, I trace the night through moments, both brief and durational, which point to something else. Working through a Deleuzian framework for affect, I account for the bodily, rhythmic, and interpersonal resonances that make up an affective environment. The collaborative elements of the underground music scene mirror the unity of bodies in synchronous motion. The processes of attunement between dancers and DJs are models for an alternate mode of being in relation. From dancefloor ethics to dancefloor, from dancefloor to organising practice, the project traces the ‘affective anatomy’ of a night out and imagines new social arrangements beyond the limitations of discrete selfhood.