Queer nightlife is all the rage. Over the past several years there has been a surge of creative practice, performance, music, media, contemporary art, and scholarship focused on the past, present, and future of queer dancefloors. This TDR Consortium issue brings together an intergenerational group of queer artists and scholars who are thinking about the rhythms, textures, and analog intimacies of queer nightlife.

From the beginning of her career, Joan Jonas has investigated “elemental media” such as air, water, and earth. Her practice recalls a distinctive form of media-reflexivity associated with early modern practices of magic, which embraced the agency and performativity of these natural materialities. Jonas is a media artist in the fullest sense of the word: not merely an early adopter of the video camera and other technical devices, but a poetic alchemist of media in their deep history.

The 12 short provocations “From the Floor” explore the analog intimacies, memories, textures, practices, vibrancies, and contingencies of the dancefloor.

Tekyeh Dowlat, once a major center for ta’ziyeh performances, has been subject to speculative claims regarding its construction date, location, and alleged European influence. Contrary to claims that it was modeled after London’s Royal Albert Hall following Naser al-Din Shah’s 1873 CE trip to Europe, newly examined Qajar-era documents, including the Shah’s diaries, confirm that its architectural plan was finalized in 1870 CE. A critical examination of historical records corrects persistent myths surrounding its origins, structure, and legacy.

Clit Club (1990–2002) was a lesbian party in New York City where, according to cofounder Julie Tolentino, “every single place in the club was for sex.” From a 1991 complaint letter found in NYC’s municipal archives to a 2019 performance-installation by Tolentino involving a one-to-one encounter in a dark mineral pool, Clit Club’s ephemera and transmissions produce lesbian surrounds—provisional envelopments of the social that are subtended by dyke sex and erotics.

Comparing the use of masks and other face coverings in the “mystery plays” of medieval England and taʿziyeh-khani, the Shiʿi form of devotional drama, reveals similar anxieties and impulses surrounding representation of the holy. In performance, what can or must not be shown of divinity? Is the (new) 21st-century inclination toward veiling the faces of holy characters in the taʿziyeh restrictive or an analogue display of divine resplendence? Comparison with the Christian medieval tradition affords a nuanced understanding.

A key figure of the urban turn in 1990s Chinese art, Cao Fei is primarily known for her experimentation with virtual worlds to create futuristic techno-fantasies of urban life. However, Cao’s decades-long interest in dance marks an overlooked dimension of her engagement with the postsocialist Chinese city. Video works feature spontaneous dancing by amateurs in unlikely urban spaces that disrupt and transform the spatial logic imposed by China’s reform-era city planning.

Performance artist Daphne (formerly known as Imp Queen) opened her 2018 festival performance with a mic drop: “There are two historical professions available to trans women: drag and sex work.” The history she cites concerns the radical unemployability that certain trans women and trans feminine people face—a common discriminatory tactic deployed by the hostile “straight” (and presumably cisgender) world. The history of the founding mothers of contemporary drag (the stage queen and the street queen) reveals lip-syncing and diva worship as trans femme embodied aesthetic practices central to drag’s contested histories.

Perhaps we need a new tragic poetry, a new tragic art. Perhaps the age of bourgeois drama—the art form of posthistory—is over. Perhaps Elfriede Jelinek is the poet for this new age, asking why people follow a “master” whose only ideology is hollow triumphalism.

Photographs are meant not just to be seen but also gifted. Father David Roney, a sexually abusive priest, moved from Minnesota to Guatemala in 1994 with his camera to minister to a remote Indigenous community, becoming the primary author of its visual history by gifting thousands of photographs. Roney’s performative generosity allowed those living in poverty to attain a visual record of their lives, but his gifts came with reciprocal obligations.

The New York Healing Circle (NYHC) practiced touch as a form of mutual aid during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The NYHC’s work challenged fear of the ill body while asserting a view toward flourishing despite illness. Participants asserted a practice of truly seeing each other—a practice of “activist intimacies” centered in care and acceptance (but not passivity) rather than in fixing, hiding, or avoiding.

This performance text is Elfriede Jelinek’s instant response on the day of the announcement of Trump’s second election victory. It was conceived during his campaign as a coda to her response to Trump’s fi rst victory, titled On the Royal Road–The Burgher King, also translated by Gitta Honegger and published in 2020 by Seagull Books.

Contemporary Japanese poet Yoshimasu Gōzō’s voice in his live performances exemplifies “in-betweenness,” ma in Japanese, literally an interval between two things—both spatially and temporally. In Yoshimasu’s poetic “radio play,” this interval is between the human voice and the electric sound produced by the radio and other machines. The sonorous body of the poet mobilizes all senses in the acoustic space of the performance and corporealizes sound into a haptic expression of the poetic spirit.

How can we listen to those whose traditional lands are being destroyed to support our “green energy” consumption? Nigamon/Tunai (2024) is a collaborative sonic performance about trans-Indigenous solidarities amid rare earth metal extraction that interweaves diverse forms of sound to engage forms of listening to ecological crisis.

Contemporary queer nightlife is shaped as much by regulatory discourse as by the unpredictable, dissociative, and even inhuman pleasures that defy normative frameworks of consent, exposure, and identity. Tracing the genealogy of “safer space” policies alongside the shifting cultural resonance of ecstasy and ketamine illuminates how queerness, risk, and digital visibility intersect in nightlife spaces.

Cognitive Motions (CM) is an Afroreferenced Practice as Research methodology anchored on the scholarship of Congolese philosopher B. Fu-Kiau. This approach operationalizes the Bantu-Kongo cosmogram (Dikenga) and distills synthetic ideograms from philosophical principles as tools for investigative improvisation and dismantling the colonial “monoculture of thought” ingrained in our sensorial and neuromuscular systems.

Rituals of listening articulate social hypotheses through the internal dynamics of the musics they feature and the relational intricacies of the encounter itself. At Berghain, extreme duration, audience mobility, and cathedral acoustics mobilize a profoundly physicalized experience of sound. This stands in contrast to the obedience and hierarchy grafted into Western classical music culture. Between these extremes lies a fertile terrain that draws the full-bodied visceral listening of the club far afield from dancefloor formulas.