The dance floor is a panopticon with a cloakroom now
Freya Price, 21, goes clubbing the way one now must: hyper-aware, tracking camera angles, scanning strangers' glasses for lenses. The one place built for losing yourself has become a place for monitoring yourself being monitored. Even the dark has an audience.
The mechanics are complete and airtight. Promoters film for content. Strangers film for TikTok. A week later, her friends surface on club Instagram pages looking, in the clinical phrasing, 'plastered'. And the recordings do not fade like memory was designed to; they wait, indexed, for future employers running background checks. A bad Tuesday at 21 is now a hiring criterion at 27.
The neuroscientist confirms what the shoulders of every young dancer already know: an audience changes the body. Nobody dances unwatched anymore because nobody IS unwatched anymore. The Millennials got the last of the blurry nights; they mock from the far bank of a river that has since been dammed.
Berlin puts stickers over lenses. A sticker. Against this. It's a sandbag against a sea, but sandbags are what we have. Enjoy the dark while it's still partially dark. Winter, as always, is unbothered — and it doesn't dance.