The exhilaration of the mysterious and rebellious energy of night is one dimension the discotheque offers up for those who remain hungry.  Emerging as the bacchanalian counterworld to the Apollonian strictures of day, it demolishes capitalism’s time-order and collapses the many into a unified cosmic throb. The discotheque seduces the subject with trance and hypnotizes with the convincing charms of fractal energies in song, dance and intoxicant. Those who participate in the nocturnal hour invoke the cauldron and drink in the moonlight, remixing alchemically the fixtures of the day world in a potent new tantra—a vernacular brought alive underground by temporary autonomous zones of ecstatic joy. This is the dark wave that replenishes life through decomposition. This is a contact zone with the silent ground of being itself.

This workshop will make use of a curated playlist representative of this aesthetic order and invite participants to enter into the counterworld of black glitter disco bombs to access the vitality of subversive joy through a writing workshop while connecting with the performance of dance in alternative community space. Bring your black glitter, goth uniforms, dancing shoes, writing gear and other improvised materials for this workshop and join us in reinventing the gallery as alternative compositional praxis space and musicological consciousness lab.

This event is taking place as part of the public program of the exhibition DISCODAZE // Side A: Look under the ground, glitter is pouring from the ugly holes.

Sean Negus is an Adjunct Professor at California College of the Arts where he teaches in the Writing & Literature Program.  In addition, he is a Lecturer of English at San Francisco State University.  He received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and an M.A. in English and completed undergraduate work in American Cultural Studies.  Scholarly research of his has examined the relationship between human consciousness and self-representation in experimental autobiographies, as well as histories of alternative spiritualities in counter-cultural literature like Buddhism in the Beat Generation.  In addition, he has completed a fellowship at Stanford researching the literary transnational.  His creative practice currently involves poetic composition, experimental and hybrid writing, and occasional forays into visual and multimodal texts through digital media.  He is a translator of poetry from Portuguese and edits an ongoing publication, Saccades, featuring contemporary Brazilian poetry. In 2018, he guest/co-edited an edition of DUSIE magazine of a similar theme. Poems of his have appeared in WebConjunctions, Otoliths, TINGE, Poe(ecology), and other publications.