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 13 (Night)life at the edge of chaos Dance floor complexities Music events are complex social phenomena. During a music event a great many independent variables are interacting with each other in a great many ways. They involve a mix of, among others, ritualized and idiosyncratic behaviours, of independent and interdependent actions, of motions and emotions, fantasies, anxieties , economics, and, of course, sounds. The broader social, musical, political, economic, seasonal, historical etc. contexts the respective music even takes place in further add to its complexity. Because of the constant interplay of all these, and more, variables, the social (night) life that takes place in the realms of music events displays a good deal of randomness, disorder and unpredictability. Consequently, the study of music events is an intricate endeavour. In the first place, the difficulties I faced in the study of music events in Freetown stemmed from the sheer number of music venues. The city is bulging with drinking and dancing bars, improvised and established music spots, bigger and smaller clubs, indoor and outdoor events, regular and irregular concerts, parties, parades, carnivals etc. In the course of six months, I visited about ninety different places that would qualify as music venues. Many of them I visited up to a dozen times, some more often. However, I would estimate the number of Freetown’s regular music venues alone – and by ‘regular’ I mean a geographically fixed location where music is played either on a daily, a weekly, or any other regular basis – to go well into the hundreds. If we add irregular and singular music events to it – meaning music events with changing times and locations and one-time events that took place in the course of my fieldwork – the number jumps into the thousands. In addition to the daunting quantitative dimension of music venues and events in Freetown, the study of music events is further complicated by the apparent fathomlessness of sociologically relevant traits of the actual subject of study – the music event as such and as a field of research. The complexity of social Chapter 13: (Night)life at the edge of chaos  121 realms constructed within and around a music event is voluminous. A dance floor alone is a field of intense social promiscuity. Once it is filled with dancing people, it yields an abundance of fleeting encounters, of rapidly changing sets of relationships, of displayed symbols, coded behaviours, casual and ceremonial actions and reactions. A discotheque’s dance floor is a social world en miniature, a field for reinforcing or subverting established social identities and relations and for testing and playing with new ones. The very act of dancing, even in the allegedly trivial form of “leisure” or “entertainment” dance that takes place in a discotheque, calls to mind the complexity implicit in the relations between people and music, in the relations between people created in the realms of music, and in the relations between people and the(ir) world(s). Dance involves patterns of body movements, motions , gestures of individuals and of groups of individuals that speak of particular meanings. To dance is to perform, and to perform is to enact certain forms of meanings. As a sort of non-verbal communication, dancing invokes a practical and kinetic “rationality”. Drewal (1991: 2) speaks about the “rhetoric of performers ”. As all performers, the participants of “ordinary” disco-dancing are staging a temporal, open-ended, processual and thus fairly complex activity. Dancing is an action which enables people – that is dancers – to become “agents in the ongoing processes of constructing social realities” (ibid.). Modifying Agawu’s (2001: 4) statement that the medium of sound “enables people in so many African communities to sing what cannot be spoken”, we might state that the medium of dance enables people to perform what cannot be spoken. Dance “speaks of” and can be “read” (or “misread”) as an expressive manifestation of affects and desires, of competition and rivalry. But dancing – “the penultimate expression of the body in motion for its own sake” (Drewal 1991: 25) – also transcends the very frame of meaning-and-sense-making. Not all dancing bears meaning beyond the act of the dance itself. Taking the dance assembly of an “ordinary” Saturday night discotheque as an example, for each individual dancer, the motivations to dance, and the meanings he or she ascribes to it, can vary and change from one moment to the other. Some dance to relax, others dance to show off, yet other dance in order to attract...

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