I am not particularly talented at dancing, but I am dancing anyway to protest. I am choosing to do something whimsical and dance in these spaces that, like most urban metropolises, usually serve as a cog in an ever-churning, ever-changing, and ever-metamorphic machine. This is my small ‘soft protest’ through mobile clubbing.
Mobile clubbing is the act of dancing in public to music playing on some sort of mobile device through headphones. It was popularised in the early 2000s with large gatherings of people dancing in trains and underground stations in London.² ³ This website is a personal homage and resurrection of the original mobile-clubbing.com¹ that was created in 2003 by Ben Cummins and Emma Devis. The pair organised large mobile clubbing events through the website in the 2000s in London train stations. They viewed the project as a social experiment and a form of gentle disruption to “break the flow of consumers and commuters”⁴ rather than a commercial event: “The point is that there is no point, we do it for fun, we do it because we can.”⁴ Thus, mobile clubbing became a particular, modern example of appropriating urban space designed for transit and efficiency. This was a reclaiming of a space of economic productivity and using it for play and pleasure. Mobile clubbing also exposed the rigidity that comes with urban control; it showed how dancing was considered a threat to the city.
Mobile clubbing is also a performance that falls within the concept of Lefebvre’s ‘Right to the City’.⁵ Lefebvre highlights the notion that capitalism has reduced cities and urban spaces to a commodity. ‘Right to the City’ talks to the fact that urban spaces should instead exist for the needs, play, and social interaction of the people who actually inhabit these spaces. Mobile clubbing or even dancing alone in public urban spaces, albeit in a slightly outrageous way, does this by intentionally occupying spaces that are really used for anything other than monetary gain. Dancing in spaces brings a scene of whimsy through occupying and reshaping urban spaces, such as Bank and Monument in London, which are usually purely used as office spaces.
Although I did embody the Flaneur during my walk with no destination in mind,⁶ I did know I would walk through Bank and Monument. That general area always seemed so sterile and really did embody how the urban can become a commodity. Almost every building is an office and Fenchurch Street Station, which is where I am dancing here, feeds all of these city offices every day with commuters. So I knew I wanted to disturb and inhibit this area with something that wasn’t centred around financial gain, so I thought my unique mobile clubbing would accomplish that.
On the other page of this website, I have mapped my dance through London. By clicking on these locations, you can access the pictures of me dancing and also a short discussion of the experience.