Rave is Not a Retreat: Partying in Times of Crisis.

There are days when every scroll on our screens feels like a slow ember embedding itself under our skin. Days when atrocities, muffled cries, and distant calls for help make us tremble. How do we keep laughing, dancing, loving — here — when elsewhere, entire worlds are being erased?

Guilt lingers. It creeps in, subtly. It seeps into the cracks of our pleasures. It whispers: how dare you laugh, smile, dance? It wants us to believe that pain must be constant, universal, uniform. And yet, pain alone saves no one. Pain alone doesn’t build a new world.

I want to offer a shift in perspective. Not denial. Not a culture of cuteness, gloss, or toxic positivity. Rather, a reclamation of how we relate to events that feel far away — and yet affect, touch, and transform us. Right here. Right now.

The truth is: we are interconnected. The genocide in Palestine is not a “distant event.” It moves through us emotionally, mentally, somatically. Social media are not walls — they are porous membranes. Portals to real worlds, charged with affect. Our anger, our grief, our silences are entangled with those of others. Through globalization, we are implicated in the tragedy: through financed weapons, trade deals, the stories we choose to hear — or to ignore.

And in all this, one burning question: what can we actually do?

We tell ourselves: what control do I have? I’m just one person — a single drop in an ocean. And yet, that is precisely why each of us matters.

Sometimes, all we have left are small gestures. Seeds. Our daily choices. Our bodies. Our breath. Our perspective. The way we love. The refusal to hate. The commitment to cultivate joy — not as escapism, but as a political act. A refusal to be swallowed by despair.

History teaches us: celebration in times of crisis is a survival instinct.

During World War II, while bombs fell on London, underground speakeasies filled cellars with jazz and laughter. People danced with fury, as if to defy death. In occupied Paris, secret balls were held in private apartments.
On the Titanic, as the ship went down, the musicians kept playing. Until the end.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, balconies became DJ booths. Raves happened on Zoom. Bodies danced alone in their rooms, but together through screens.

Even today, in Gaza, some still write poetry, play the oud, paint on ruins. Sometimes, partying is simply refusing to be dehumanized. Refusing to dehumanize ourselves. And in occupied territories, war zones, or militarized cities, raves continue to emerge — like in Ramallah, Palestine, where a vibrant techno scene persists despite the violence of the occupation. 

These gatherings become acts of existence. Temporary zones of freedom.

Raverie: Dreaming New Worlds as the Old Ones Collapse

In an abandoned warehouse, a hidden forest, a field near a border, the rave erupts. It’s not just a party. It’s a rupture. A crack in space-time where norms dissolve. Where bodies sweat a kind of truth no words can carry.

Mark Fisher¹ once described the rave as a “waking dream of collective freedom” — a fragile but tangible moment when another world feels possible. Not in some abstract political way, but in the beat, the presence, the trance.

Barbara Ehrenreich² wrote that collective joy is a deep instinct, constantly repressed by cultures of control. Raves, in that sense, are acts of deprogramming. Places to scream without language, to connect without doctrine.

Anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey³ called it a “Temporary Autonomous Zone” — a party that erupts, disrupts, then disappears. Not to escape the world, but to experiment with other ways of being, burning with intensity — and to carry the embers back with us.

Rave is also a queer techno-utopia⁴. For many marginalized communities — racialized, trans, neurodivergent — rave spaces are sanctuaries. Places to be fully oneself, to heal, to build the worlds we still can’t see in reality.

On a somatic level, raves can also be deeply healing. Just like the gazelle needs to shakes off the trauma she accumulated after being chased by a predator, we must also shake off the hurts and conditionings that no longer serve us. What better place to shake your booty and nervous system than at a rave ?

Even now, people rave in Ramallah, Kyiv, Tbilisi, Beirut. Sometimes clandestinely. Often with rage. These parties become embodied responses to war, dispossession, collapse. They say: as long as we dance, we are still alive. As long as we connect, death has not won.

To celebrate is to refuse death as the only answer.

It is not a denial of suffering. Not a denial of mortality. It is a choice — to orient ourselves toward what is still alive. To honour the ones we’ve lost — by living for them. To create spaces of light. Of gathering. Of grief. Of integration. Of shared emotion. Of listening. Of slowness. Of presence. Of joy. Of pleasure. Of celebration.

Because we don’t build a just world only by denouncing injustice. We also build it by embodying, here and now, what we long for. Maybe that is our piece of control. Lead by example. Show another way of being.

To laugh, dance, celebrate — without stopping the outrage — is to embrace paradox.
It is to practice love as resistance.
It is to fight through joy.
It is to reclaim our humanity.