Tag: party

Seize The City Season 2 // Reflecting youth and subcultural moods

Strobe lights cut through the crowd with shades of blue, red and white. Sweaty bodies are dictated to by the vibrations moving from the speakers through the floor. A rundown building in the middle of Johannesburg’s city centre is transformed into a sonic experience with the invitation to queer space through one’s presence. Yellow cups float between the people on the dance floor with the name of the party translated into a declaration of intentions – Seize The City.

Jose Cuervo‘s Seize The City Season 2 was a moment to fully embrace the now, expanding on their motto, Tomorrow is Overrated. As a kind of call-to-arms for every rebel and nightlife activist, the party served as a platform to celebrate young people in Johannesburg and the energy they inject into the city through their cultural production and subcultural expressions. Taking place in a functioning recycling depo in Selby, the space echoed this sentiment, with fragments of the underground 90s rave scene flying in and out of memory.

Well known as well as up-and-coming artists, designers and other creatives were present, indicating the significance of the space for young creatives. “It felt like an Instagram feed coming to life. A lot of people you see on the internet were there and a lot of internet friends able to connect,” states Natalie Paneng, artists and Seize The City attendee.

Fashion mirrors cultural moods, and subcultural foundations, and this had a strong presence. Fashion played an important role as a signifier of taking the spirit of the party to heart, while also reflecting the spirit of the people who attended. Oversized pinstriped blazers, stockings used as tops, the bra as a shirt, platform shoes, fanny packs trapped across chests, combined with pins, fishnet stockings and pale pink sunglasses. DIY aesthetics engulfed in the flames of unapologetic self expression. An experiment in styling and self-making, on an individual and collective level.

8 June 2018
DOOMSNITE // A new party for young people of colour in Cape Town

“We are the future, for the kids by the kids,” states Antonio Druchen, one of the organisers of DOOMSNITE, a new party for young people in Cape Town. Antonio along with Qaanid Hassen, Naledi Holtman, Raeez Kilshaw and Likhona Camane created the event with the intention of gathering young people like themselves in one space for celebrating and connecting. Under the guidance of Crayons’ Ra-ees Saiet, they were able to host their first event on the 29th of January. Their hope is that this event will grow and become a space that represent creative freedom.

Reflecting on the time that sparked the idea for the collective, Raeez expressed that, “I felt as though we [had] all met before, in a spiritual realm.” This is representative of the kind of collective connection they have already created through their time together since meeting at a project hosted by Corner Store called Summer Camp. This was an apprentice programme for young up-and-coming artists in Cape Town to show them that they can cultivate skills in creative practices such as DJing, styling, and photography, and be successful.

The team refers to themselves as a kind of collective that also allows for each member to work on their individual practices independently too. This allows them to build a brand for their event, and offer each other support, without being completely absorbed by one project. Therefore, their collective is not exclusively about producing together, but also about providing each other with creative and emotional support. This is reflective of the direction that a number of people of colour from Cape Town are taking with regards to cultural production.

Influenced by underground, English-born hip hop artists MF DOOM, the team curated their first event around this. “MF DOOM’s ability to use music to portray many different characters reflects how music came first for him and for us, it’s the same thing,” explains Naledi. “Inspired by MF DOOM, we find beauty in creating a whole new world of intricate personas, vivid visuals and detailed bodies of music, all behind a mask,” Likhona expressed. Ensuring that the space was representative of the energy that has brought them all together – freedom, creative pleasures and wholesome music – their first party was explosive. Expressive visuals, music and dance coloured the night, and this included performances by Garth Ross and Guillotine Squad.

In addition to being a space for having a good time, the aim for the party is for it to be a platform that can facilitate networking between young people. This extends the party into an informal support structure.

Be sure to check out their next event in February at The Living Room.

12 February 2018
If Kitchener’s (KCB) is like a home

“There are venues and there are institutions”, I was once told: a friend attempting to draw categories in Johannesburg’s night-time cartography. Undoubtedly, Kitchener’s (or KCB) falls into the latter group. It’s the ‘go-to’ club when you have no prior plans. It’s the comfort of knowing the sound and crowd to expect when you arrive. It’s the ease of no dress code and affordable entrance fees. It’s the knowledge that you’ll likely see at least ten other people you know. “If the question is, where do we go to party [tonight], we are the first call”, says DJ/manager Andrew Clements.

Among the audiences, artists and curators of KCB are those who speak of it as ‘home’. “Home isn’t where you come from”, said author Pierce Brown, “It’s where you find light when all grows dark.”

If KCB is a home, it is one whose family stretches back generations. The pub/hotel was built in 1902 and is regarded as the second oldest building in Johannesburg. It is a testament to the historical centrality of our night venues. Radium Beer Hall, Kitchener’s Carvery Bar (KCB), Guildhall Pub have watched generations of dreamers and workers spill their histories over bar counters — wrestling with the possibilities and futures of the city. Marc Latilla, one of the first DJs to ever play at KCB, has sought to archive the venue’s history: another indication that night-dwellers are often keepers of suppressed urban narratives.

According to Latilla, by the end of the 18^th century, Braamfontein had transformed from farmlands into a thriving middle-class suburb. The Milner Park Hotel, now known as Kitchener’s, was built in 1902, surrounded by German businesses. It served as a drinking hole for British troops, as well as postal riders on their way to Pretoria. In 1902, towards the end of the Second South African War, Lord Milner had a meeting with the notorious commander of the British forces, General Lord Kitchener, in the newly-built hotel. Kitchener had been a brutal warlord: primary instigator of South Africa’s concentration camps, in which thousands of Boers and black Africans were killed, mostly women and children. The name ‘Kitchener’s’ is thought to have arisen from this “auspicious” meeting.

If KCB is a home, this is the family’s ugly origins: it’s ancestral elder, a colonial brute, whose legacy continues to cause disquiet among his descendants. Still, his portrait hangs from the mantelpiece, above the figurative fireplace, where his great grandchildren dance and cuss and caress and worship, along with the descendants of his victims. These young ones burst through at night, trampling on grandma’s wooden floors, spilling on the old carpet, brushing past the velvet wallpaper. Each time, confronting history with a cocktail of detachment, denial, and dissent. It is a story of “dancing on graves”, of repossessing haunted spaces. You see it not only here but in the parties at the old train station, Halloween blowouts at the Voortrekker Monument, projected images of Hector Peterson at Soweto’s Zone 6.

The new generation of revelers took root at KCB in 2009, when Andrew Clements began using and hiring out the old hotel for parties. “This used to be just an old man’s club”, Andrew explains,“where a bunch of 60-year-olds would come every day at lunchtime, have a few beers, and then come back again after work. By 6 or 7 the place would close up”. But as DJ’s re-imagined the dusty Bar and Carvery, and the parties grew, and KCB quickly became a living room for young creatives, experimenters, hipsters, and students.

If KCB is a home, then, like any other home, it is not just about love, safety, memory and identity. There is also domestic power and sources of conflict. A strong sense of community often comes with a shared culture: away of dressing, speaking, moving on the dance floor, that has the potential to alienate others. Money, too, can also mess with families. One regular told me that he experienced a class territorialism that would make it difficult for someone who regularly partied at a tavern to party at KCB. To add to this are gender disparities, with femme bodies particularly under threat. Elders and relatives may try to intervene: we’ve seen dance floor dissent at the monthly Pussy Parties, the introduction of a female bouncer, regular and recognizable door staff, and a huge diversity of music genres to boost inclusivity. But families, inevitably, are sources of both contest and comfort.

If KCB is a home, it is one built on music. For years, DJ’s Rosie Parade and Danger Ngozi, of Broaden a New Sound, have curated its sonic identity,rooted in quality, pioneering music. There are family reunions with regular artists and promoters: 2 Sides of the Beat, Kid Fonque, BeatNN and Subterranean Wavelength. And then there are visits from distant relatives. This year: Tendai ‘Baba’ Maraire, Hussein Kalonji, Tama Sumo and Lakuti. And of course there are family events: Disco de la Mode is a group trip to the beach; Below the Bassline a spiritual gathering around the dinner table, and Zonke Bonke like your uncle’s birthday party.The soundtrack is not from your radio or television. It’s the specially-curated playlists that this family has come to love: exchanging sounds, travels and collections across time and space. Like all good household gatherings, the food keeps coming till the early hours of the morning. At 4am, you’re helping your exhausted cousin out the door. And, as author Wendy Wunder once said of a home: “It feels good to leave. Even better to come back”.

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1 February 2017
Turn-up Talk Series Episode 3

The ‘Turn-up Talk Series’ is a collection of discussions in which young Jo’burgers share their nocturnal lives: stories and reflections from the city’s dancefloors. The candid conversations explore nightclubs as stages for young people’s negotiations of identity, belonging and power.

‘In this episode, we talk about music, moves and what they say about us’

20 January 2017
For lessons in liberation from late nights in Camden, see Robert Lang’s Filthy and Gorgeous

Youth, drink and beauty are the currency of late nights the world over. But with all this some people still seem to be having more fun than everyone else. In his first solo show SA born Robert Lang offers a visual legacy into Camden in the early to mid noughties; in the time of beautiful, doomed Amy and wild, messy Pete. Frequenting a local pub called the Hawley Arms before it was commercial and documenting the exploits of his muses and friends, Lang candidly created a context for Camden post millennium.

Robert Lang born in Durban, South Africa, moved to Camden as a teenager, ‘to see the world’ and he encountered some colourful, creative people there. Filthy, Gorgeous in Camden Town is an ode to that time and space of youthful discovery and revelry contained and coloured by the themes of ‘Indie, Rock, Punk and Vintage’. It is an exploration of hedonism and vivacity just after the world had been meant to end.

Robert Lang fashion photography Filthy Gorgeous zine

The images reflect partying and fun as it is- when it’s good; messy, raucous and liberating. Lang’s photos are all of women and their exploits within this scene, a nod to the enchanting, capturing beauty of the female form and the wild streak of a young women entering adulthood, and revelling in independence and urban life. The exhibition holds a mirror to Lang’s life in Camden, to the streets and spaces he and his friends enjoyed in his years in the North London neighbourhood. Since then he has moved to Los Angeles and the women documented have also moved on and grown up and out of Camden.

Robert Lang fashion photography Filthy Gorgeous zine

In filthy,gorgeous Camden, art is life and creating comes as easy as a night out with friends. And the camera gets an intimate pass because it is being held by a friend and not some overzealous party phothog. Every scene, every establishment has that moment of making itself and attracting interesting people and experiences, but it never lasts. Eventually it explodes and gets too commercial so all the sensitive people stop going and move on. But these images tell the story of a vibrant time in Camden town, when everyone wanted a good time and nothing was contrived or self conscious. It is a beautiful story of youth and young womanhood accessorized with beer and bad behaviour. Sooo lit, sooo liberating.

Have a look at Fitlhy, Gorgeous Camden Town by Robert Lang; the exhibition is on at the Doomed Gallery in Dalston until July 17th.

Robert Lang fashion photography Filthy Gorgeous zine

Robert Lang fashion photography Filthy Gorgeous zine

Robert Lang fashion photography Filthy Gorgeous zine

12 July 2016
Just for the Drama: A Trip through the Nu-Flex Party Archive 2006–2008

We’ve become expert archivists of our lives after dark. At nightclub entrances and dotted across our dancfloors are clusters of partygoers huddling to snap that essential Selfie. A big night out is an exercise in self-curation — the clothes, the music, the crew, the venue – each serving as raw materials in our imagining of the space and our place in it. The imagery is then methodically logged on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat: a clublife catalogue, a recreation record.

Recently I was offered a rare glimpse into a party archive, recorded and documented before the social media take-off, before our night lives were exploded into a kaleidescope of online albums. The catalogue belonged to fashion designer and DJ, David West, who in the years 2006— 2008 facilitated a series of Cape Town-based parties called Nu-Flex.

Nu-Flex emerged in conversation with Nu-Rave: a wistful wave of post-punk and acid house, which hit the UK/European club scene in the mid-2000s, draped in UV glitter, glow-sticks and neon skinny jeans. Nu-Rave sought to re-interpret and revitalise 90s Rave Culture: ‘The likes of BoomBox and other club nights in London, where dressing up was a thing’, David explains. BoomBox offered a spectacular collision of fashion and music — novel for its time. Partygoers revelled in the shambolic dress-up, mingling with many of London’s fashion heavyweights. Relatively short-lived, Nu-Rave served as a passing moment of ephemeral euphoria. It came and left, leaving in its wake a dazzling debris of bold prints and lime-stained nostalgia. The novelty had a life-span, David said. ‘It’s better to burn bright than burn out’.

Back in the mid 2000s, Nu-Flex partygoers would amass on a more-or-less bi-monthly basis at Disko-K in Cape Town’s CBD. Today, Loop Street is a popular night-time destination. But at the time, this was ‘a part of town that nobody ever went to. Sailors came in for drinks while docked in the nearby harbour’. Disko K, which no longer exists, ‘had the most ridiculous sound and light set-up and it had kareoke.’

The Nu-Flex crowd included droves of students, interspersed with an older group who had lived through rave’s first wave. ‘We did also have lots of visitors from Johannesburg and yes – some kids used to travel in from Wellington and Worcester to be there’.

Nu-Flex was draped in audacious colour. But David concedes that the scene was predominantly white. Not much has changed about Cape Town since, he added. Contributing to the narrow demographic were the limitations of David’s own audience. The Nu-Flex crowd, he explained, was often an off-shoot of Evol, an edgy divebar, which David also ran and describes as having been ‘very white’. In a time before social media, news of Nu-Flex travelled by word-of-mouth. This gave it an ‘underground cool’, but also entrenched forms of exclusion. Perhaps there’s something to be said about the relationship between rapid-fire-tweets and the democratisation of dancefloors.

Nu-Flex parties were heavily themed, encouraging partygoers to be daring in their outfits. Drugged-up Spring themes included: Tropi-core, Optikamax, Antihistaflex. Add to the mix the metallic Hyper Go-Go and the garbage-glam-themed Gutta-Flex. The time of Indie boys dressed in black-and-white, eyes cloaked in mascara, had peaked, giving way to an exuberant and colour-crazed fashion revival. All across town, partygoers would gather for the ‘Pre-Flex’, revelling in the act of ‘getting ready’.

Rather than the mucho masculinity commonly associated with nightclub bouncers, Nu-Flex had a ‘Door Queen’, with drag being an essential component of the party aesthetic. ‘I hired a make-up artist to style my friend Andrew (who had done loads of drag in the past)’. The Door Queen screened partygoers’ attire as they entered, commenting on their lack of effort or offering compliments to those who had come out in style. ‘The gay scene had already become very bland and hetero-normative, so I was hell bent on encouraging the queerness of the party’. For David, Nu-Flex would have been incomplete without a Drag Queen on the decks, so he made it a point to learn drag himself.

‘I was a club kid. I was schooled in aesthetics in the 90’s at Rave and House clubs’. Both as a fashion designer and party planner, David’s muse was club culture. ‘It’s been a huge part of my life and allowed me to contribute to the city culturally over time’.

Reflecting on Nu-Flex, he said: ‘I was desperate for something bright, fabulous, happy and over the top. I remember one night, I had a net full of silver-foil balloons released from the balcony at the peak of my DJ set. Just for the drama’. This was a celebration of excess: reflected in eccentric décor and dress, in being encompassed by a 303 synthesiser, in losing oneself in Nitris Oxide or psychadelics, and finally leaving the club in a 4am haze. ‘You danced so hard, it was more like a flex’. Alongside David himself, DJs included Pierre Estienne, Dario Leite (the Midnight Men), Gazelle and Bradley Abraham. Spoek Matambo and Marcus Wormstorm would perform as Sweat X. ‘Most were old enough to have had experienced the early 90s to some degree’.

Nineties nostalgia continues to hold weight among South African millenials, with much of our aesthetics harking back to the technicolour of a post-94 transition. It’s evident when we drop a TKZee lyric , or rock a Spice Girl choker, or revel in Brenda Fassie bubblegum.

‘I think many of the kids today appreciate the cheese factor of the nineties sound’, David says, ‘like Venga Boys or Crystal Waters. But they can’t handle actual rave and acid house. There seems to be a need to be able to attach irony to something for it to be enjoyable today. Do I sound old? I guess I’m waiting for something to emerge that sounds as new as House/Rave/Techno did in the 90s. And then of course, when a scene emerges around that, I think that will be thrilling’.

David yearns for the club cultures of old:

‘Nightclubs should be places of self expression and freedom, a fantasy world even. I am saddened by the clubs (or lack of them) today. Where’s the pizzazz? Where has the spirit of rebellion and non-conformity gone? Why is it all about mainstream pop music today? What happened to the underground or alternative?’

There’s no definitive answer. But if I were to go in search of one, I would ask the gqom artists playing new mixtapes out their car boots in Durban. Or the crew gathered in a courtyard to hear the latest electronica from a friend’s home studio. Or the audiences that galvanise sonically and politically around FAKA and Angel Ho. When it comes to contemporary cultural production in South Africa, I am full of that old-school, pink-glazed, neon-clad idealism, with which David would be very familiar. I see young people delight in the experimental, perhaps with less of an inclination to pursue escapist bliss. Stylistically, politically and musically, we are increasingly inclined to disrupt. But we also see the importance of giving disruption mass appeal and mobilizing for inclusivity. Like David, I believe the emerging scene will be thrilling — pumped with a powerful mix of critical nostalgia and uncompromising futurism, an unhinged blend of radio-hit consumability and radical resistance.

The Nu-Flex catalogue teaches us to pay attention to our party archives: as testaments to a generation imagining, wrestling, searching…

The Posters

The Decor

The Door Queen

The Kids

17 May 2016