the disco ball is a universal language

there is an object that has been turning slowly above nightclub dance floors since the showcased in jazz clubs of the 1920s and hasn't stopped being magical 

can you guess what I'm talking about?!

you got it: our fav discotheques' piece of equipment: the 'disco ball'!

and strangely, the disco ball was not originally invented for dancing or discos, but rather invented in the late 1890s to showcase the brilliance of new electric carbon arc lamps! 

then from the 1960s to the 1980s, these devices were a standard piece of equipment in all nightclubs, and have had a resurgence lately, particularly as home decor, yah baby, and even suggested as a safe way to watch a solar eclipse!

the mirror ball — the disco ball, as it became known when the seventies adopted it and made it theirs — is arguably the most democratic piece of design ever created

then disco dawned, dappling dancefloors with underground energy as Black, Brown, and queer people built a utopia apart from a world that gave them no room to dance - Marke Bieschke, Stayin' Alive: the history of the disco ball

it doesn't require electricity to work. it doesn't require programming or maintenance. it needs only a single point of light and a room full of people willing to move

what it does with those ingredients is remarkable

the light from a mirror ball doesn't illuminate a room the way a lamp does. it populates a room with light — small, wandering constellations of brightness that move across people's faces and hands and the walls behind them. it's the opposite of a spotlight

the mirror ball doesn't single anyone out. it scatters light democratically across everyone in the room, and somehow this means that everyone in the room is transformed by the same light simultaneously

that's not an accident. it's the physics of community

the thing about dancing

dancing is one of the few human activities that collapses social distance without requiring conversation. you can dance next to a person for an hour and never learn their name and feel, at the end of the night, that you have genuinely shared something with them

the music is the shared language. the dance floor is the shared space. the mirror ball is the shared atmosphere — the signal that everyone in this room has agreed, tacitly and collectively, to inhabit the same moment

gen x and millennials grew up at different points in the history of the dance floor, but the essential experience is the same. the point where the music gets loud enough that thought gives way to movement. the specific feeling of a room that has found its rhythm. the moment that is simply, immediately, now

where the mountain and the dance floor meet

funk + fina started with an observation: the people who chase powder runs and the people who close the dance floor are often the same people

this is not a coincidence. both require a willingness to be fully present in your body. both produce a particular kind of joy that lives below the level of analysis. both are better when you do them with other people, in a space that feels like it was built for exactly this purpose

the mountain and the dance floor are both environments where the usual social scaffolding comes down. where you're judged not on your title or your inbox or your net worth, but on how present you are. how much you're actually in the room, in the moment, in the experience

the mirror ball turns slowly wherever the music finds the right space. the light goes everywhere. no one person is in the spotlight — everyone is in the same light

that's the whole thing, really