You can go dancing to create that shared experience of drunken revelry with your friends, and you can also go just as hard alone so as to process how weird things are with your avoidant ex; an ideal setting for either end of this spectrum seems to be in the middle of the dancefloor, at midnight, in the middle of summer. This was all possible at First Avenue on Saturday, July 18th where ‘Club XCX’ was held, a charli xcx dance party as developed by ‘What the Dance’, a brand that curates specific dance parties by creating a setlist of DJs who incorporate the party’s theme/genre with their distinct DJ styles and personalities.

I danced until 2 am but I did not think I was going to stay that long based on the whole vibe when I arrived - a little lacking and off. When I first arrived around 9:30 pm, adorned with a little glowstick necklace they offered at the entrance, the dancefloor wasn’t quite yet packed; there was a noticeable energetic chunk of people near the front by the DJs and an obvious thinning out from the middle of the crowd to the back. Additionally, I was somewhat put off by the projection behind the DJs: high quality music videos featuring charli xcx from different eras, mixed with other pop/hyperpop artists’ videos that were not intentionally synced with the music (but was synergistic overall, I admit) and a big QR code related to the ‘What the Dance’ brand  in the upper left corner (A subliminal ‘xcx club’ in the brat’s album cover art style flashed every now and then too). For some reason I was pretty adamant about this choice of projection content, as I think I would have preferred a more abstract, edgy visualizer that responded to the BPM or beats of the music, along with a more subtle QR code/ad, instead of sometimes making eye contact with charli circa 2014 singing on top of a school bus (the sequence of music videos were on loop). It wasn’t terrible, as I think the music videos did help with the overall energy and headspace, but for me it took me out of it.

Fortunately, projection content aside, the DJs played hard hitting and creative sets that wove together charli’s music along with other hyperpop/pop artists, and this kept me dancing for the rest of the night. On stage, the DJs were accompanied by the talented gogo dancers, who each masterfully met the energy of the crowd with their very bratty dancing. The first set was fun - easy to dance to and easy to sing along too as well. I recall the first set involved some throwback pop songs like Kesha’s Die Young and 3oh!3’s Don’t Trust Me to accompany charli’s remixes. The second set was relentless and intense with a considerably higher BPM that each song was held to, as it was remixed with drum and bass elements. The third set was a mix of the first two, with high intense energy but also included some breathers in song intensity and texture.This last set was also my favorite, as the DJ was creative with his transitions and the style/personality of his DJing seemed more present to me. Regardless of the differences between the sets (fun side note, each DJ played 'guess' at least once), the crowd that filled out over the course of the night met the energy that all of the performers onstage were asking of them, and I really enjoyed being in the middle of all of it. 

Show Review: Maria Arriola