The Party


The party is a shift out of a framework, held together not by structure but by skin. Where solid joints do not exist and continuity takes over, a seamless continuity that stitches together disparate materials forming a new kind of softness. A party exists out of accumulation but never consciously plotted. Its geometries lie within layered, morphed invisible mediums – feeling, movement, sound, light, air.

The body understands information faster than the brain, each person has an acute sensitivity to vectors and trajectories. The collision of body to body leads to moments of synchronized movement, a universe of bobbing heads, an overlapped embrace. The next moment it can curdle and fall apart. Discordance. This ongoing tension progresses into a flow of energy that rides alongside the transitioning state of the scene. Perhaps the patterns inscribed on the floor were not haphazard, they had divine effects. As proof of a nonverbal, physical, emotional connection. No one holds the centre and no one is at the edge, throwing ourselves into a crowd of one another.

No one remembers a party clearly, it is a fuzzy empire of blur. The eyes flip around, from one second to another. My eyes focused on the fluorescent drinks then pivoted to a sweaty armpit. My hips moved against my feet but my shoulders were moving with my feet. My ankles weren’t any match for my body’s insistence. The battered sweatshirt bunched around my waist had descended on to my trainers. I felt hot and suddenly cold, my cheeks were burning at a level which an orchid could bloom. Overheated and it was cold again. I felt whips of syntax in the air above my head just as the music was transitioning.

Fusing beat to beat, taping pitch to pitch, a smooth moment of transition overarched with eloquence. Stagnant, recycled, multiplied. At some point the ears don’t even listen anymore, for music has electrified the veins. Its vibrations don’t just penetrate, but also set up a resonance with the body’s skin. The skin that no man’s land between a human being and the world, changes from boundary to link. The division dissolves, a person overcomes his skin. The skin overcomes its person. Vibrations transmitted from the skin to the intestines, to the inside is ecstasy, the mystical experience.

The air got thinner and tighter as the night went on. As if it had been pulled and hemmed in at both sides by the curbs. The rising altitude dropped the beat, the light moved and the shades were drawn. The sudden change in point of view dizzied the eyes of the beholder. The red light casted a glow resembling disappearance. Its stinging straightness coiled around the bodies, keeping them intermingling and its heat melting them into unison. Then the light retreated and stretched over the heads, over the voices and shared breaths.

The party is a social exchange that overcomes structure, it’s skin is light, flabby, porous, busy and opening out. It touches, it feels, it transmits, it connects, it wraps around freedom and an ongoing co-existence of events as one of the greatest sensations in life.