there’s always energy for dancing

What do you like most about dancing? there’s always energy for dancing is the script of a performance lecture that offers a theory of queer nightlife through the frequencies that get us moving, sweating and twerking on the dance floor. It explores the feedback loop between fashion, club dancers, sound systems and the DJ by thinking about televisual bodies and club scenes on The New Dance Show, a Detroit-based televised dance party focusing on house and techno that ran from 1988-1996 on WGPR-TV 62, the first black owned and operated TV station in the US. How do fabulously dressed, black bodies dancing to house and techno music highlight frequency as a queer method of imagining otherwise?

madison moore, Ph.D. (American Studies, Yale), is a DJ and assistant professor of Queer Studies in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. They are broadly invested in the aesthetic, sonic and spatial strategies queer and trans people of color use to both survive and thrive in the face of rolling catastrophe. His first book Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), offers a cultural analysis of fabulousness as a practice of resistance. Other articles have been published in venues including The Atlantic, Theater, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, the Journal of Popular Music Studies and We Can Do Better Than This: 35 Voices on the Future of LGBTQ Rights (Penguin UK), edited by Amelia Abraham. madison has performed internationally at a range of nightclubs, parties and art institutions, including the Perth Festival, Performance Space Sydney, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, American Realness, Tate Britain, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and currently holds a nightlife residency at The Kitchen in New York. madison is currently writing a book about queer nightlife. In Summer 2022, madison will be an artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute.