Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” is playing, and the irony is not lost on me. I am, indeed, shuffling in time to the music by myself. Scattered around, a handful of people are doing likewise, not quite meeting each other’s eyes.
It’s the middle of the day, and none of the elements that would make dancing in Great Britain socially acceptable apply here: we are not a) doing an exercise class, b) half-cut at a festival, or c) half-cut at a wedding. Instead, we are stone-cold sober and in full view of strangers at London’s Southbank Centre. And yet there’s a bigger, more important mood underpinning what’s going on here this afternoon, one that’s powerful enough to trump any lingering, surface-level embarrassment.
“Dance as if no one’s watching – and know that maybe someone is watching you,” advises DJ Linett Kamala from the decks, as a sudden burst of dry ice gives the stage a smoky, ethereal effect. Her comment may sound strange, a little creepy even, to a passer-by. But not to those who’ve come here intentionally to attend today’s event. This is a “grief rave”, a unique (and completely free) invitation to anyone and everyone to shake out their day, dance out their pain, and dedicate a song to someone or something they’re missing – “from a personal bereavement to a breakup, or a few minutes of releasing some political rage”.
Some have made their way to this outdoor dancefloor overlooking the Thames by design; others have stumbled upon it by accident. All are equally welcome.
The idea was first conceivedin 2022 by interdisciplinary artist Annie Frost Nicholson and Carly Attridge, the founder and director of social enterprise The Loss Project, after each had suffered a personal bereavement. Frost Nicholson had just made a short film about her late sister, who died in an accident. “We had this real bond over music and dancing,” she says of her elder sibling. “There’s that sort of direct line to a person through music, because you can play something and it just brings you back to that time together – it transports you to a time and place.”
Attridge had also experienced the unparalleled ability of music and movement to provide connection, following the death of a friend who’d been an old-school Nineties raver. “I remembered her every year by dancing to her favourite song: ‘Born Slippy’ by Underworld,” she recalls. “I’d been ruminating on this idea of how dancing is such a powerful way of remembering someone.”
Alongside Everton Bell-Chambers, who runs Housewarmers dance collective in Peckham, the pair landed on the idea of hosting a dance space where people could honour their loved ones through music, allowing bereaved attendees to pick a song for a specific person and dedicate it to them. They started small, first testing the concept with friends, before taking a mobile sound system to locations in London and inviting people to join them – whether they were grieving the end of a relationship, the loss of a loved one, or simply the mournful state of the world. Something clicked.
“There was obviously a real public need for it, because it became something that we never expected,” says Frost Nicholson; it felt like there was a demand for people to “physically process their grief”, adds Attridge.
They’ve now hosted around eight official grief raves, in the UK and further afield. Each one has been different, yet they’re always amazed by the profound conversations around loss that are stoked and enabled; the poignant stories and dedications that participants share; the power of collective human experience to help us heal. And it’s not just about physical death. There are many different kinds of grief that participants bring to the dance floor: Attridge tells me about one woman who was processing the sense of loss that had been triggered by the menopause.
You can play something and it just brings you back to that time together – it transports you to a time and place
Annie Frost Nicholson, interdisciplinary artist
Back at the Southbank Centre, my own slight reticence at being a woman dancing alone in broad daylight is quickly subsumed by the juxtaposition of levity and gravity walking side by side in this space. One minute, another woman and I are letting loose to Groove Armada’s Noughties classic “Superstylin’”, exchanging shy smiles at the nostalgia of it all; the next, Kamala is reading out a dedication from “Marian, for your dear Charlie, who left you earlier this year”. A woman tentatively approaches the stage as the music swells – an Italian song, slow and lustily sung – and Attridge puts an arm around her as we learn that Charlie was Marian’s son: kind, generous and cheeky; a “darling”. “Charlie, we love you and we miss you,” Kamala finishes.
It is a curious feeling to couple raving with suffering as well as celebration – perhaps because, culturally, it’s become an alien notion to associate dance with anything other than abject happiness. But it’s completely natural to express all emotions through physicality, posits Kamala.
Being of Jamaican heritage, Kamala feels the cultural pull of dance as a medium for processing trauma. “Music and coming together has always been part of that,” she says, citing London’s annual Notting Hill Carnival as an example; Kamala became the event’s first ever female DJ in 1985. “It’s seen by some as this party, but we keep trying to tell people the message that it’s not just a party, right? It is us grieving,” she says. “It was birthed out of loss of life, and that was a way of the community, my parents’ community, dealing with that.” The carnival first started in the 1960s, growing out of the effort to heal divisions after riots and fascist attacks on the Black community led to the racist murder of Kelso Cochrane, an Antiguan man, in 1959.
While the typical “buttoned-up Brit” stereotype might often hold true, there are encouraging signs that we are becoming more comfortable with movement as a form of release. Ecstatic dance, long viewed by many as a fringe, “woo-woo” practice, has steadily become more mainstream over the past decade, with hundreds of events taking place throughout the UK. Sober raves have also risen in popularity, banishing the idea that dancing is solely the preserve of those who’ve drowned their inhibitions in alcohol. Ministry of Sound, for example, launched a series of dry raves this spring and summer.
The shift could well be a sign of the times, argues Frost Nicholson. From Brexit to Covid, Trump to the climate crisis, Israel-Palestine to Russia-Ukraine, “people are just carrying a lot of heavy stuff”, she says. “There’s a lot going on in the world.” Meanwhile, we’ve become “saturated” with a constant supply of rapidly changing news. “That has had an effect on the way we want to engage with each other,” she adds. “We really noticed, in making a lot of public work, that the public themselves are out of words. They still want to come together, they still want to connect with each other, but in ways that aren’t exhaustingly verbal.”
Mental health has deteriorated alongside all of this, with rates of anxiety and depression increasing over the past 30 years and children and young people particularly affected. And, while the idea of dancing your troubles away might sound glib, there has been fascinating research to suggest otherwise. In 2024, a study published in The BMJ concluded that dance was the most effective form of exercise when it came to reducing depression symptoms; it also trumped cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).
This finding doesn’t feel all that surprising to me as I arc my arms in grand, melodramatic gestures on the South Bank while singing along to Édith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” in honour of Pip’s beloved mam, Sheila – “we call them mams in the northeast” – who died of a stroke. There are tears in her eyes, yes, but there is also a look of fierce pride on her face as she belts out the words, catching my eye as we mirror each other’s movements. The group has grown since that first awkward shuffle to Robyn, from 10 to 20 to 30 or more now.
I look around and see a mother dancing with her tweenage daughter in a ballroom hold, their faces alight in a moment of pure frivolity. A doting father twirls a delighted toddler in her pram; a group of teens in baggy jeans giggle as they pop and lock. We may be strangers, but we are all connected in this brief, shimmering moment through moving our bodies to an iconic French song – and, ultimately, through Sheila herself. We’ll never meet her, yet her memory has woven a kind of temporary magic among us.
I suddenly, unexpectedly, feel my own potent stab of loss. My granny recently passed, aged 99, but it’s not directly her I’m grieving – it’s the awful realisation that I don’t know what her favourite song was. I never asked; now I never can.
At one point, the heavens open and rain begins to pour, like the very sky herself is crying. No one is deterred; everyone keeps calm and carries on dancing. People’s faces are upturned, determined even. If anything, it’s cleansing: there’s a freedom in letting the water wash away the pain. And then, as if perfectly choreographed, the sun bursts out from behind a cloud and cloaks the assembly in gold. “Look out for the rainbow!” says Kamala. There is sadness and joy, all at once. There is devastation, celebration, loss, connection, release, relief. I’ve always been a words person – but here, for once, I’m lost for them.
