Club culture as pedagogy
1. Rehearsal Space (1:34)
2. Celebration as Method (1:29)
3. Fugitive Pedagogy (1:59)
4. Counter-Power (2:02)
5. Study in Anticipation (2:51)
6. Transglobal Underground (1:19)
7. Promised Land (1:38)
8. Rehearsing Liberation (0:58)
Total running time (13:50)
“Study is what you do with other people.”
– Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013)
1. Rehearsal Space
Everything I have learned about community in the past 30 years I have learned inside nightclubs. From underground resistance and navigating darkness to the kindness of strangers and the love of comrades. Durational music, a choreography of light, and bodies moving through space open a threshold of longing and belonging.
The club is where we celebrate being together, and where we begin to free ourselves. COMMUNE looks at club culture as pedagogy and treats celebration as a form of study.
“Study is what you do with other people,” say Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. I have been thinking about that. In the club, or on the way home reliving the experience, and during the work of writing, archiving and editing. Study is what I have done with other people inside clubs. People who never thought of themselves as teachers: DJs, organisers, sound engineers, light designers, dancers.
Club culture forms a room for study without books or exams. A room in which teaching and learning take place through proximity and presence, through elation and relation, and through the ways we gather and move together as one.
COMMUNE came from these experiences. From understanding collective joy in club culture as a form of pedagogy. What if celebration itself could be a rehearsal of freedom? What if the club, the gathering, the group chat, the shared taxi, and the after-hours were all spaces where we practise liberation?
Across cities whose music scenes I have felt in recent years – Amsterdam, Kampala, Mexico City, London, Shanghai – I have noticed similar events with similar tendencies: rhythms moving bodies in rooms made by community. Their studies bypass theory and begin with praxis: with tempo, duration, and surrender.
“But ecstatic rituals are also good, and expressive of our artistic temperament and spiritual yearnings as well as our solidarity.”
– Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (2006)
2. Celebration as Method
If the club is a rehearsal space, then celebration is its method, a way of learning that begins with the body. Celebration originates from the Latin celebrare, meaning “to assemble and honour.” In many cultural traditions, people gather to celebrate their community through music and dance, dissolving hierarchy, building solidarity, and practising freedom.
When the club is a rehearsal space, we celebrate our community through rhythm and sound, dismantling domination, forming affinities, and rehearsing liberation through energy and anarchy. Celebration softens us, warms us, and bonds us. Collective joy lowers our defences and brings us closer. To celebrate on the dance floor is to treat that moment as an experiment in how we might desire life differently. As study, celebration is a collective improvisation: an exercise in freedom that is not yet here.
For Baruch Spinoza, joy is the affect through which the body gains the power to act, a passage from limitation towards possibility. Joy transforms through relation; our capacities grow when we meet others, and with them our possibilities. Joy turns solitude into company, isolation into contact. To feel joy together is to gather strength together. Celebration makes that change real. It shows how collective emotion becomes communal motion, how bodies, synchronised, become powerful.
Joy needs looking after. COMMUNE practises joy as the ongoing reciprocal labour of mutual care. Celebration is the form this labour takes. Through attention, sensitivity, and solidarity, we gain the power to act and the awareness to learn. And thus, celebration, as a way of playing, dancing and building community together, becomes study.
“We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.”
– Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1990)
3. Fugitive Pedagogy
For many of us, the dance floor, DJ booth, and dark room can become temporary shelters inside the club. They operate like pressure valves, releasing tension from bodies fleeing capture and control.
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call this the undercommons: a space of study, refusal, and resistance that lives within and against dominant institutions. In the club, those who study, refuse, and resist form a kind of undercommune: artists meeting each other offline for the first time backstage; lovers taking ecstasy during the after-hours drift; comrades continuing their political conversations on the night bus home. At the best of times, the club becomes a space of relation. Here, in these nocturnal undercommons, we learn feelings first.
Thinking with Jarvis Givens, author of Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (2021), this can be read as part of a longer lineage – the Black traditions of teaching and learning carried out within and against domination. Givens traces how generations of educators and students built lessons that could survive the violence of the classroom. Teaching became protection; learning, resistance. Study as escape and survival.
To study under such conditions is to render oneself invisible. Édouard Glissant calls this the right to opacity: the choice not to be fully seen or known within systems that demand visibility. For Glissant, opacity protects people: it keeps complexity and difference intact when the world seeks to extract and flatten them. Knowledge moves this way when it needs to protect itself. What cannot be exploited lives on. In the club, opacity becomes visceral: a feeling, as Marshall Jefferson taught us, that moves our bodies and sets us free.
COMMUNE approaches opacity as collective preservation, a requirement for rehearsing liberation. It gathers the practices that emerge when we study in the club: the dance floor as a site of resocialisation, the house rules as a manual for abolition, and the DJ set as a genealogy of revolutionary music. Here, learning circulates in ways that feel more like rhythm than instruction. This is what makes it fugitive: learning that evades capture, extraction, and appropriation. You find it in soundchecks, group chats, and shared rides home: small acts of love that keep us linked through the night. Study makes room for freedom to enter.
"We do this 'til we free us."
– Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021)
4. Counter-Power
Capitalism continues to shape our lives in ways that exhaust, isolate, and endanger all of us. Governments speak of "transition" while exacerbating the extraction that makes life unliveable. This system will not save us. Our response is to build the infrastructures we need to survive within and against it through the daily work of mutual aid, cooperation, and celebration.
COMMUNE begins by recognising that survival has always been a collective creative responsibility, calling for all our imagination, solidarity, and resolve under pressure. It is this survival that created club culture in the first place, with trans existence, queer desire, and Black expression as its parents.
We draw inspiration from anarchist, Indigenous, and abolitionist traditions that show how communities organise without state permission, building the social and material infrastructures that states neglect, let decay and destroy. In these traditions, the political is material: we cook, house, repair, and heal together in the ruins of coercion, extraction and alienation. What emerges is a counter-power that resists, and that insists on living otherwise.
Our pedagogy of celebration is grounded, embodied and improvised. It recognises how we already practise other futures in the present: in sound systems, community kitchens, mutual aid networks, and local assemblies. From these gatherings, fugitive infrastructures emerge, makeshift systems for survival that reach beyond the world as it is, take shape in our defiance, and endure as the people's alternatives.
We learn from Dean Spade, for whom mutual aid is the foundation for survival; from Mariame Kaba, for whom hope is a discipline; and from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, for whom land is the first teacher. This lineage, extending from Barbara Ehrenreich’s history of collective joy to adrienne maree brown’s emergent strategy, reveals that organisation and celebration are both expressions of a collective life that thrives through free association.
To build counter-power is to nurture that collective life: to turn exhaustion into regeneration, despair into coordination, and obedience into refusal. To build counter-power is to rehearse for a world without domination. To build counter-power is to be insurgent through relation. To build counter-power is to practise freedom with every body in the place.
"Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.”
– José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009)
5. Study in Anticipation
COMMUNE draws on queer futurity, understood with José Esteban Muñoz as a politics of the not-yet. For bell hooks, the queer is "not about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it), but about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live." Queerness is a method of world-making that transforms the pressures of what hooks calls "the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy", her "culture of domination", into the materials of our own power: celebration, fugitive study, mutual aid, and abolition.
More than an identity, queerness becomes a temporal practice: the ability to imagine and inhabit futures that the present denies. Here, the dance floor becomes a queer chronotope, a space where we step out of linear time and a time where we defy normative space, and glimpse what Muñoz calls “the not-yet-here.” In these moments, celebration becomes a revolutionary study in anticipation, a way of feeling freedom before we have it.
This futurity runs on a mix of communal labour and love, of solidarity and mutual aid. Dean Spade defines mutual aid as "collective coordination to meet each other's needs" from an awareness that "the systems we live under will not." Mariame Kaba describes abolition in a similar way, as a practice of "building a new world where we have everything we need: food, shelter, health, freedom, safety, everything." Read together, their work treats affinity and association as the affective and material basis of survival.
In the club this looks like paying DJs equally, whatever their draw; like solidarity tickets, where those who can pay more cover the door for those who can't; like awareness teams trained to de-escalate without calling the police; like drug checking and free water, meeting needs the state answers with punishment.
If mutual aid and abolition build the infrastructures of survival, then celebration sustains them. When we celebrate together, we stay together. No matter the hardship, collective joy keeps us close and tells us we belong. Belonging keeps us soft and sensitive towards one another, and from that softness grow hope and possibility.
Celebration is, with Moten and Harney, a form of fugitive planning: improvisation as preparation, joy as rehearsal, community as reward. Sometimes celebration mourns: for lost lives, lost worlds, and lost possibilities. "No darkness lasts forever," writes Ursula K. Le Guin. "And even there, there are stars." We gather in joy so that we can endure rather than end. We move together in duration so we can practise the coordination collective life requires.
We are indebted to trans understandings of transition as a shared, ongoing experiment in living beyond what was imposed; a collective practice of becoming. If trans existence is one of club culture's parents, this is the inheritance: the knowledge that a body, like a world, can be remade. Trans people already live the not-yet.
Queer futurity, celebration, fugitive study, mutual aid, and abolition meet here as a single pedagogy of becoming, a discipline of hope enacted through anticipation, invention, and owning everything together. As Junior LaBeija declares in Paris Is Burning: "Opulence. You own everything."
“Music and its rituals can be used to create a model whereby identity can be understood neither as a fixed essence nor as a vague and utterly contingent construction.”
– Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993)
6. Transglobal Underground
The fugitive pedagogies of club culture defy capture. We move with the music wherever we can – sometimes across borders, sometimes across digital spaces. Through ports and servers, across sound systems and Signal groups, wherever we can make space for listening. In these movements, COMMUNE works in affinity with many international comrades I keep learning from: insurgent communities salvaging collective life in gentrifying cities across the world, from Kampala to Mexico City, from Lisbon to Shanghai, and home to Amsterdam.
Progress Bar (2015–2020) was one such node – “a club night devoted to communal desire and collective joy,” where conversation, screening, and performance merged into study. We sensed that the club could be an assembly, a syllabus, and a political party. Each line-up, each scenography, each season was a lesson in being together otherwise. The work of those years continues through COMMUNE: in the attention to atmosphere, the ethics of invitation, and the grounding of generosity. What began in 2015 as an experiment in club culture has since crystallised into a method for building fugitive infrastructures for political struggle.
Across these scenes, study is a communal, creative act. Nyege Nyege, NAAFI, Príncipe, Genome 6.66 Mbp: each is its own pedagogy, with its own teachers, tempos, and rules, and none of them needs COMMUNE to name what they do. What travels between them is the practice – scenes learning from scenes, lineages extending through exchange. Together they form what Detroit gave us the name for: an underground resistance.
“Never a failure, always a lesson."
– adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017)
7. Promised Land
Even though the club promises freedom, it is never free. Any night some lose themselves, others lose out: who is invited to perform, who gets past the door, who feels safe enough to surrender. The not-yet-here is blocked by the already-there: the admission fee, the guest list, the video cameras, the right names in your phone.
These limits reach far beyond selection at the door. Many are excluded before they arrive – by stairs, strobes, and sound levels, by nightlife built without disabled or neurodivergent bodies in mind. Commercial nightlife simulates joy rather than generates it, producing audiences instead of assemblies. Surveillance, policing, and security practices reproduce the very harms we gather to escape. And every night runs on the underpaid labour of bartenders, cleaners, runners, and technicians, whose working conditions rarely match the freedom promised on the dance floor. These are not anomalies. They are the structure we inherit.
Age, ability, class, race, gender, and sexuality continue to shape who we see, hear, and welcome. The dance floor rehearses equality but reinforces hierarchy. Music circulates through economies that extract from the communities that generate it. These tensions do not cancel the club's radical potential; they define it.
To speak of freedom in nightlife is to face its failures and learn from those who resist them: organisers who build ramps, quiet rooms, and early sets into the night; crews who pay the cleaners and technicians as carefully as they book the headliners; collectives who rebuild the club with patience and intention. They practise the invitation, hospitality, and generosity that COMMUNE is still learning.
The club’s radicality lies in its persistence, not in its perfection. We keep testing freedom against everything that denies it. Each night we try again. We do this 'til we free us.
8. Rehearsing Liberation
“To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.”
– bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003)
Rehearsing means practising possibility. It means gathering, grounding, and resurging with others; testing ways of working together; learning about conflict, consent, and consensus. Every rehearsal draws the community closer: we stay together so that we can build together. Another world is on her way. "On a quiet day," whispers Arundhati Roy, "I can hear her breathing."
To rehearse liberation means to practise freedom in advance: when we lose ourselves in trance; when we support a friend through gender-affirming care; when we house comrades in need. We teach – and learn – that liberation begins now; as Paulo Freire taught, “whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.”
COMMUNE asks how we can study celebration as a rehearsal for liberation. How collective joy can create the conditions for collective freedom. How we can reoccupy time, wresting it from the machinery of extraction.
When we rehearse liberation, we do as Angela Davis does: we act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And we do it all the time.
We celebrate this transformation with joy. The world we are making is already here.
–
Note on Sources and Lineage
This manifesto forms part of the research for COMMUNE, a film about club culture as pedagogy. This text has been written from Amsterdam, a former imperial centre marked by colonial histories in Indonesia, Suriname, and the Caribbean. COMMUNE approaches these conditions with awareness, learning how to work within and against them.With gratitude to the lineages that sustain this practice:
Baruch Spinoza, Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, bell hooks, Édouard Glissant, Paulo Freire, Mariame Kaba, Dean Spade, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Arundhati Roy, José Esteban Muñoz, Paul Gilroy, Jarvis Givens, Barbara Ehrenreich, adrienne maree brown, Ursula K. Le Guin, Nkisi, Rosa Pistola, Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, Jam City, Elly Vineyard, Yves Tumor, Philip Jeck, Michael Oswell, Gideon Kiers, Manique Hendricks, Lucas van der Velden, Stefan Wharton, Pim Sem Benjamin, Karl Klomp, Lars Holdhus, Arnau Sala Saez, George Knegtel, Amie Galbraith, Pieter Kers, Maurits de Bruijn, Darco Cezveciyan, Dimitri Kneppers, Tom van Huijstee, Rob Schröder, and Guusje Segond von Banchet – and to all the collectives, crews, and comrades named within,
Juha van ’t Zelfde
Amsterdam, 2025
Note on the Sound
This is an unreleased recording of Philip Jeck performing live at the Bimhuis in January 2008. Its presence here is an act of gratitude and a commitment to continuation.