The dance show exploring how the ‘90s UK rave scene was a political act of rebellion

Rave has come a long way since the illegal parties of the early 1990s, moving from abandoned warehouses and rural farmland to a subculture carefully documented in art galleries and museums. From C/O Berlin’s No Photos on the Dance Floor —which charted the development of nightlife in Berlin since the fall of the Wall—to the more global perspective offered by the travelling exhibition, Night Fever. Designing Club Culture 1960 — Today, and Sweet Harmony at the Saatchi Gallery, grainy shots of uninhibited shindigs and youthful subversion have gained a new fanbase among the post-internet generation. This re-evaluation continues with Wasteland—the latest dance production by celebrated British choreographer Gary Clarke—which attributes the demise of industrial Britain with the rise of the rave scene in the UK in the late ’80s and early ’90s. 

Currently touring in the UK, after debuting last year, Wasteland follows on from Clarke’s award-winning production COAL, which explored the UK miner’s strikes of 1984-85 through dance. “Wasteland essentially looks at the same landscape but ten years on,” Clarke tells SLEEK. Through a father and son narrative, Wasteland reveals the differences between two generations—the ex-coal miners and their children—and how this younger generation ended up forging a nightlife scene in the derelict warehouses and abandoned workspaces of Northern England. Having grown up in the mining town of Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire in the 1980s himself, Clarke drew on his own personal experiences, and in particular, those of his older brother, who was an avid raver at the time. “I interviewed him and all his friends about what they used to get up to in farmers’ fields, driving for miles and bouncing from rave to rave,” explains Clarke. “They stayed away for so long because they didn’t want to come back to Grimethorpe. It was a grey, depressing village to be in. We all wanted to get out. For us, rave culture was a method of escapism, and it gave us a new sense of community.”

Equating the rise of acid house with the fall of industrial Britain may seem extreme, but the connection has also been made by Turner-Prize winning artist Jeremy Deller in his recent BBC Four documentary, Everybody in the Place, which similarly explored this socio-political climate. “When you start to think about it carefully, the parallels between the two movements become extremely clear,” says Clarke on the relationship between the ravers and the mining communities. For example, at one point, Wasteland depicts Freedom to Party—a campaign that protested against the introduction of the 1994 Public Order Act, a law passed to prohibit outdoor rave parties. “The youth pushed back exactly like the miners did,” says Clarke. In addition, there is a resemblance between the movement style of rave and the physicality of manual labour. “The actions are industrial, repetitive, and robust,” says Clarke. 

One of the main challenges of creating Wasteland was capturing those movements for the stage. “Raving is all about escapism and letting the mind and body be free,” says Clarke. “So I had to think very clearly about how I could create a choreographic landscape that had craft behind it, but felt spontaneous at the same time.” To do this, Clarke and his dancers watched endless footage from the ‘90s’ illegal raves—in Berlin and Ukraine as well as the UK— picking specific movements, recreating them, and stringing them together into phrases. “Every movement you see has come from someone of the time,” says Clarke. “It’s really exciting because it means our audience recognises the vocabulary. They say, ‘I remember that move!’ or ‘I knew a guy who used to do that!’” 

Importantly, Clarke didn’t only work with professional dancers in the show. “It feels wrong to make a piece about the community and not involve them,” he explains. “For me, it’s not another funding strategy, it’s deep in the veins of my work” (referring to the fact that during the tour of COAL, the company worked with 90 women from all over the UK to play the roles of the miner’s wives as part of a community cast initiative). On this occasion, for Wasteland, Clarke is working with 90 men—many of whom have links to the mining industry as well as brass bands local to each of the show’s tour venues —to play former coal miners. 

While club culture still exists today, the strong presence of bouncers, high entrance fees, dress codes, and drink charges have little to do with the original illegal rave scene. “When governments got a sniff that they could make money from raving it became commercialised very quickly. So it lost its edge,” Clarke says. “For my brother’s generation, it was a political act, the dancing was a pushback, so the commercialisation of rave really put the fire out on why it started in the first place.” And this is continuing: in many cities rising rents and gentrification are forcing venues to shut up shop—just take the impending closure of Griessmuehle in Berlin, for example. Despite this, Clarke  remains hopeful. “It’s sad that club culture is dying but something else will be born of it. The minute all the clubs shut down people will take to the streets,” he says. “You’ll never stop people dancing.”