“If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.” Printed on t-shirts, painted across banners and bombed on streets worldwide, anarchist philosopher Emma Goldman’s statement would become pervasive within contemporary cultures of protest, from reclaimed streets to G8 Summits, WTO blockades and anti-Bush and pro-justice events around the world. While expressive and carnivalesque styles have flourished within protest since the 1960s—when transcendence of the boundaries of art and politics gained popularity amongst countercultural elements responding to both capitalism and the traditional Left—the 1990s occasioned a growing ludic and aesthetic sensibility within popular struggle. In a magnification of the Situationist-style tactics which had earlier gained popularity, the 1990s saw stencil artists, billboard liberationists, new media artists and punk-hop sound systems jam frequencies and mount counter-spectacles at significant sites of corporate rule. Armed with puppets, spray paint, instruments, programming code (a full spectrum of media), artivists would cause tactical embarrassment for agents of neo-liberalism in local and global spheres. Occupying major thoroughfares of global metropoles and cracks in the Net, they were committing to popular acts of reclamation—practices that were made possible as the carnival became integral to direct action.

As Jeff Ferrell (2001) reminds us, Goldman held that anarchism is “a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions”. The generation of anarcho-liminal conditions of disorder and creative subversion out of which unforeseen alternatives might appear, resonates with a time when dancing in the streets—when carnival—would be adopted as a vehicle of spectacular resistance: part of an emergent reclamational praxis of mobilising the new world, to paraphrase an old Wobbly message, “in the shell of the old” (see Shantz). From May 16 1998, when a massive intercity Global Street Party coincided with a G-8 meeting in Birmingham, and J18 1999, when the Carnival Against Capitalism transpired, the re-appropriation of that festal interlude of transgressive corporeality, visionary freedom and liminal community universal to the human experience—the carnival—saw the anti-corporate and pro-global justice movement emerge as a threat to market fundamentalism. The creative and unpredictable amalgamation of poetic and pragmatic components at Seattle in November 1999, at S11 2000 in Melbourne, or at Genoa’s Global Day of Action (J20 2001) triggered uncertain outcomes, potentiating alliances between disparate opponents (of, for example, Free Trade Agreements, over-consumption and the more recent “War against Terror”), and as a consequence, the repression of such occasions, as witnessed recently at the New York City Republican National Convention in 2004. The model for this party/protest combo, this “protestival”—to use the phrase of Sydney’s Non Bossy Posse stalwart John Jacobs—surfaced in London’s Camden Town in 1995, when an orchestrated motor vehicle collision on High Street caused traffic disruption and precipitated a Reclaim the Streets party.

With its immediate precursor in road building blockades, in particular the spectacular detournement of East End’s Claremont Rd in 1994, in RTS the forbidding road relented to a convivial street, private space gave way to spontaneous eruptions of truth and beauty, to a noise of graffiti, cloth patch subvertisements, radical literature stalls, billboard liberations and plunderphonics, an orgiastic miscegenation enlivened by music and dance. For, a carnival (of protest) could not be a carnival without music and dance. And it is a curious thing that the most explosive and popular dance culture since disco—rave—gave the protestival a distinctive flavour. RTS possessed a centripetal force, pulling hardcore ravers into the orbit of road protesters, and ecological and social justice campaigners in the shadow of the UK Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. Harnessing the ludic in public protest, revivifying direct action, RTS recruited rave’s inclusive sensibility, its ekstasis, into the service of the cause. Acid house raves were already transgressive and re-inhabitational contexts (prior to the mass commodification of dance), but the reactionary interventions of UK Conservatives effectively transformed a form of recreation into a mode of political resistance. Since raves were a means by which the carnival was lived by millions of youth in the UK and elsewhere around the globe as electronic music, MDMA and dance migrated widely, the Goldmanesque “spirit of revolt” resounding in the streets would prove particularly appealing to a youth population for whom “dancing” had become a cardinal pursuit (see St John 2004). Commentators recognised that the techno-rave experience possessed a potential more radical than other popular music forms in a gathering carnival of resistance. Jeremy Gilbert, for instance, noted that “whereas rock music corresponds more closely with representational politics”, the immediacy of contemporary dance music made it ideal as a medium for direct-action (1997, in Huq 93). Making manifest a “hidden future inside the present”, the ecstatic intimacy of rave is seen to share a “radical indeterminacy” (Jordan 46) with non-violent direct action—a condition of uncertainty powerful in its potential to unite disparate parties. As ravers emerged from nocturnal warehouse parties into the light of reclaimed streets—where they converged with Critical Mass bike riders, alternative energy advocates, anti-corporate protestors, unionists and anarchists—the carnival came to the streets of (by the end of the 1990s) hundreds of cities around the world. Of course, other music forms would motivate a whirl of arms and legs in the re-taking of the streets (as Seattle’s Infernal Noise Brigade would attest), but the (rave-infected) carnival became an indispensable tactic in a virulent movement.

Emerging to counter the otherwise inexorable tide of privatisation clear-felling remnant public commons (signified by the motor car—which was also responsible for massive carbon pollution), RTS would become a popular model of resistance—at once living performance and tactical spectacle—translated around the globe. Replicants would accumulate a staggering array of causes, as demonstrated by the occupation of Trafalgar Square in 1997 when dockers and ravers, environmentalists and trade unionists, anarchists and socialists converged in creative resistance (Jordan), or unify groups around specific issues, such as convergences in the Australian outback employing RTS-like tactics to counter the uranium industry (St John). By the late 1990s, dance had acquired an extra-party significance, as seen in the proliferation of techno tribes and party machines motivated by social justice and ecological issues, and the pleasure-politics manifest in RTS would express and enthuse a new media-savvy counterculture importing and translating the protestival template. Yet while the carnivalesque formula for globalised resistance would become a potent tactic of a global justice movement (see We Are Everywhere), its continued regional and global efficacy is worth serious investigation following 9-11 2001 and the subsequent spectre of perma-war.

Works cited
Ferrell, J. Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Goldman E. Anarchism and Other Essays. Dover Publications, 1969.
Huq, R. “Raving, Not Drowning: Authenticity, Pleasure and Politics in the Electronic Dance Music Scene”. Eds. D. Hesmondhalgh and K. Negus. Popular Music Studies. London: Arnold, 2002: 90-102.
Jordan, J. “The Art of Necessity: The Subversive Imagination of Anti-Road Protest and Reclaim the Streets.” Ed. G. McKay. DiY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain. London: Verso, 1998: 129-151.
Jordan, T. Activism! Direct Action, Hacktivism and the Future of Society. London: Reaktion Books, 2002.
Notes From Nowhere. We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism. London: Verso, 2003.
Shantz, J. “The New World in the Shell of the Old.” Arachne 6.2 (1999): 59-75.
St John, G. Techno Terra-ism: Feral Systems and Sound Futures. Ed. G. St John. FreeNRG: Notes From the Edge of the Dance Floor. Melbourne: Common Ground, 2001: 109-37.
St John, G. “Counter Tribes, Global Protests and Carnivals of Reclamation.” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 16.4 (2004).

Graham St John is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. He recently edited Rave Culture and Religion (London: Routledge, 2004), and FreeNRG: Notes From the Edge of the Dance Floor (Altona: Common Ground, 2001).


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