#65 To dance is to be free
communing at the club
On a cloudy day in January last year, I visited the Amsterdam Stadarchief, lured by an exhibition covering club culture history in the city: To Dance is to be Free. I loved it so much I went twice, fascinated by the posters and clever, tiny invites made of gold-colored paper, images of revelers at the RoXY, polaroids in blurry, joyful colors. The historic Amsterdam club hosted the first balls of the country, spaces where community and freedom of expression thrived. It wasn't only a space for dancing — it was a space for celebrating life.
Several generations of clubgoers have developed their identity, made friends or found love in Amsterdam’s nightlife. In a club, shame is set aside and daytime rules do not apply. Here, people of all ages celebrate a parallel existence. Thanks to an interplay of music, dance, light, decor and other sensory stimuli, there is room for total ecstasy and euphoria. Moving closely together in the dark, people can forget the stress of everyday life for a while. To dance is to be free.
I spent most of 2023 and 2024 outside of the club. During times when work was scarce, I slashed my “going out” budget in favor of other things, like occasional eating out or paying for short holidays. Sometime in early 2025, after a stint of new work seemed to last long enough, I started getting curious about the nightlife again. Where are the new spaces we're celebrating life in? Where are clubgoers enjoying themselves most these days? Amsterdam offers something for everyone, that much is certain. I visited Raum for the first time in February, Lofi after a couple of years in March, and a long-lost memory slowly started taking shape: the reminder that for an evening, we're all sharing the same space, moving along the same plane, building the dancefloor together.
It is probably the opposite reaction I've historically had to partying - a night out as pure escapism. I looked down upon it (ever so slightly!) as a waste of money, all-out hedonism at its finest, and not the kind I condoned. And yet! The winter rolled into spring, rolled into summer, and the parties kept going. I buy tickets to see one of my favorite DJs in May, and later this coming August, I join one of my friends at her set in a festival in Amsterdam Noord and stay much longer than planned, dancing in the front row with strangers.
I am curious about the night air, the spacious quality of it, and the people you meet in the smoking area. The world opens up as if to say, don't you remember what it's like to leave it all behind? To push everything in and out and around on the dance floor?
How much has the club scene changed, if at all, in the past forty years? Club nights in the 80s looked more present, more visceral. That much I can sense when I walk through the stadarchief exhibition. A few clubs in Amsterdam today prioritize the dance floor as a space for connection - I've read house rules encouraging clubgoers to save talking for later, to enjoy the dance floor as a space for co-creation with the evening's performers. It's interesting to notice how club etiquette has evolved in the past years, featuring stickers on phone cameras, shared bathrooms, the possibility to refill your cup with water from the sink.
There's something liminal and otherworldly about entering a space where photos aren't allowed, light is minimal at all times, and there are few if any windows. Clubs remind me of casinos, airports, train stations. We are all in-betweeners, identity becoming homogeneous, all of us stopping over between here and the next place, our signifiers going out the window with them. We're gamblers, flyers, commuters, dancers. I like the idea of this suspension of reality taking over the club at night. I like the energy surrounding it, the possibilities it affords us. I like surrendering your plans to an evening that can lead you to interesting places (and faces), from the moment you get ready, ritualistic, to the moment you've arrived.
In the European Union, a significant portion of the population experiences loneliness. A 2022 EU-wide survey found that 13% of respondents reported feeling lonely "most or all of the time" over the past four weeks, while 35% felt lonely at least some of the time. This translates to roughly 50 million Europeans experiencing loneliness most of the time. Young people, particularly teenagers, report higher rates of loneliness compared to older generations.
I know what some of us are thinking. I've thought it too: what does a place like the club have to do with this? And yet, age isn't necessarily the problem. Venues like Melkweg regularly organize parties for teens, ranging from ages 14 to 18, opening their space to young dancers wanting to enjoy the night. Creating spaces for shared experiences has always fascinated me because of the contrast I've experienced at home. In Venezuela, it's common to spend time with people of all ages in parties and bars, making cross-generational interaction easy and integral to our culture. I haven't been able to find something similar here, except in Amsterdam's nightlife, if not in day festivals across music genres, inviting the young, the old, and the in-betweeners to experience something together.
By 2050, the share of those 85 and older in the European Union will more than double. Organizations like Papy Booom, a Belgian nonprofit, aim to address loneliness among older people and create more opportunities for fun. One of their goals is increasing interaction across age groups, which the World Health Organization says is critical to aging well.
Papy Booom organized a club night for a group of residents from Brussels retirement homes, with many not having been out in over 40 years(!). The event was a big hit. Clubgoers in their early and mid-twenties enjoyed dancing with octogenarians, dressed to the nines in their best outfits and ready to dance together.
Finding these kinds of articles reminds me that in the clurb, we're all fam. There is no age limit to sharing the dance floor.
Nowadays, a return to clubbing feels like a way to unwind and feel safe, ironically, surrounded by strangers. It feels fun. The ticket fees and ticketswap hunts and the overpriced coke zeros feel like part of an experience, the beginning of entering a liminal space to let go in. Practicing presence somewhere full of stimuli feels like a rewarding search, something like tracing the outlines of a map that leads somewhere, finding the next steps along the way.
I like the idea that on the dance floor, everybody's equal; a reminder that there's power in movement, in creating a space where we can all feel free. Journeying into the night time together and taking the odd Uber out at seven in the morning is, yes, weirdly transporting. I don't care how insufferable that sounds. Dissecting the evening on the car ride home, laughing as you're biking back into your neighborhood, the sky tinted in beautiful, impossible colors. For the evening, we're all together, suspended in time. We're all experiencing it, we're all in it. A return to the dance floor is a return to community, if you want it. It's our house.
