On my inaugural “Float,” I became part of a vibrant collective of 50 luminous individuals dancing our way down Manhattan’s High Line. We danced through the Meatpacking District, past the poignant AIDS Memorial at St. Vincent’s Triangle, and concluded our evening by shedding our shoes and dancing barefoot in the refreshing Washington Square Park fountain. You might have encountered groups resembling ours during a night out in New York or LA. We are a spectacle of dancing figures, adorned in shimmering jewelry, ethereal fairy wings, and playful unicorn onesies. We are intentionally conspicuous. We might have even invited you to join our dance. We trust we weren’t overly insistent. Floating instills in us the belief that everyone secretly desires to dance with us.
What the Float—the mastermind behind this unique experience—is a burgeoning dance and urban exploration movement in both New York and Los Angeles. Participants embark on guided dance tours through city streets, parks, and hidden pathways. Equipped with silent disco headphones, everyone on the tour synchronizes to the same curated soundtrack. The music is thoughtfully selected to harmonize with the specific environment we inhabit. For hours, And We Dance Dance Dance, immersed in movement, laughter, and collective energy. We spin around lampposts with the exuberance of Singin’ in the Rain. We can-can down staircases with unrestrained joy.
The principles of Float are straightforward: don your glowing silent disco headphones, tune into the designated channel, count down from 10, and dance dance dance. Follow your guide wherever they lead. Avoid traffic. Respect the personal space of non-participating pedestrians. Each Float unveils a novel route and a fresh musical journey. There are musical selections perfectly suited for dancing past outdoor diners in Greenwich Village, tracks for joyfully running along the Brooklyn Heights promenade with the dazzling Manhattan skyline as a backdrop, and tunes for playfully navigating wooded trails in Prospect Park like mischievous elves.
In the days following a Float, as my body recovers and I return to my routine, a lingering sense of vibrancy persists. While Float may not be a world-altering phenomenon, the act of Floating is transformative. The spaces we traversed through dance now possess a different resonance, and my relationship with these spaces has subtly shifted. As a consequence of this dance-infused exploration, the psychogeography of my city—the intricate interplay between urban environments and my emotions and behavior—undergoes a noticeable change.
Psychogeography is a concept closely linked to the Situationists, a group of French avant-garde socialists active in the 1950s and 60s. While the Situationists didn’t partake in Floats, they engaged in “drifts,” or dérives in French. Situationist theorist Guy Debord described dérives in his essay, “Theory of the Dérive,” as instances where “one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” During their dérives, Situationists would wander through cityscapes, sometimes for days, without a predetermined destination or time constraint. Instead of being driven by consumerism, they embraced aimlessness, seeking to experience the city authentically, free from capitalist influences.
What the Float resonates deeply with the spirit of the Situationist drift, particularly its emphasis on urban exploration. The tours are often filled with unexpected discoveries, consistently leading me to uncharted territories, even as a New York native and former walking tour guide. I believed I had explored every corner of the city. However, What the Float has also guided me to places I might have consciously avoided: Midtown, Times Square, and contemporary commercial developments such as Hudson Yards—spaces that exude a sterile, almost jarring atmosphere.
Nicko Libowitz, the visionary behind What the Float (and a modern-day psychogeographer), shared his initial Float experience in a recent interview. During his time as an acting apprentice at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, he observed, “All the people working for little to no money at a theatre festival day and night picking up cigarette butts and building sets needed some sense of release and a feeling of actual ownership over that space.” Libowitz was so captivated by the experience that he initiated his own Floats in New York City a few years later, inviting others to dance dance dance and reclaim urban spaces.
What the Float capitalizes on the tranquility and emptiness of business districts after dark. Libowitz explained that Floats allow participants to “recontextualize all these spaces that you’ve been stomping angrily through trying not to trample tourists or step in anything, to this wonderland at night that you create yourself.” While participants might resemble flash mobs converging on modern skyscrapers, the feeling is akin to a carnival arriving in town. We feel a sense of ownership. Floating momentarily humanizes these imposing spaces, diminishing their intimidating nature, and empowering us to dance dance dance through them with newfound confidence.
The timing of my involvement with Float coincided with my growing political activism, a connection that arose serendipitously through individuals I met at protests and socialist gatherings. It was a mere coincidence of being politically engaged in New York City in the 21st century. Pure chance placed me dancing dance dance down streets where, just days prior, I had marched and chanted, “Whose streets? Our streets!” It was a charming happenstance that I found myself leaping and twirling in glowing headphones and glitter through neighborhoods remarkably similar to those I canvassed for socialist political candidates.
Nevertheless, these experiences inevitably intertwined. Once you and your radiant, dancing companions have embraced in a collective groove in the heart of Lincoln Center Plaza, in full view of a thousand theatergoers, other forms of public expression begin to feel different. Through these parallel journeys, I realized that becoming a vocal and visible participant in political demonstrations—addressing law enforcement, speaking through a megaphone, or organizing groups of strangers—becomes significantly easier when you possess a sense of spatial ownership. This feeling of ownership is precisely what New York City’s anti-homeless architecture and heavily monitored public-private parks actively suppress.
I discovered that this embraced sense of ownership could be applied to diverse contexts. I could carry it with me. As one of thousands of volunteers who traveled to Iowa in January 2020 to canvass for Bernie Sanders, confidently approaching apartment complexes in rural agricultural towns felt less like intrusion. My Float experiences had fostered a greater comfort level in engaging with strangers about crucial issues like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, empowered by the spirit of and we dance dance dance.
Before the pandemic, a highlight of Floating was offering my headphones to onlookers, inviting them to briefly join our sonic and kinetic world. Some accepted, many declined. Regardless of their response, for a fleeting moment, a wordless connection was established with a stranger. Soon after, I would return to dancing, moving onto the next urban adventure. Canvassing, particularly in unfamiliar environments, mirrored this interaction, albeit in a more deliberate, verbal manner. Having floated, my apprehension of strangers and rejection diminished. Doors slammed in my face or angry confrontations no longer felt as daunting.
Another fundamental concept in Situationist thought, alongside dérive, is détournement—roughly translated as rerouting or hijacking. This concept involves subverting the original message of an established symbol. Détournement often manifested as political pranks, such as the 1950 incident where individuals disguised as monks declared the death of God from the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral during Easter High Mass. Détournement is also recognized as culture jamming or subvertising. The Situationist-influenced publication, Adbusters, exemplifies this by manipulating advertisements and corporate logos to critique consumer culture. For instance, culture jammers might alter a Coca-Cola billboard to spell out “Capitalism,” prompting passersby to reconsider familiar messages.
These traditions are rooted in a lineage of cultural activism that often emerges from left-wing movements during periods of social upheaval. In 2011, Adbusters solidified the Situationist legacy in contemporary radical history by initiating an act of détournement in the heart of the financial world. Their call to Occupy Wall Street resonated globally, leading to the three-month occupation of Zuccotti Park. Decades earlier, in Paris, March 1968, the Situationists were among the leftist groups that occupied an administrative building at Nanterre University to protest class discrimination and bureaucratic oppression. This action is considered a catalyst for the explosive demonstrations leading to the May 1968 uprisings, which included the largest general strike in French history, widespread student protests, and the barricading of the Latin Quarter. Guy Debord actively participated in the Sorbonne occupation. Slogans inspired by his seminal work, Society of the Spectacle, a Situationist manifesto, were graffitied throughout Paris, echoing the sentiment to dance dance dance against the status quo.
While quantifying the precise impact of cultural movements like Situationism on revolutionary uprisings is complex, their ideas and aesthetics undeniably play a crucial role in igniting social movements. May ‘68 resulted in a 35 percent minimum wage increase for French workers and the democratization of French universities. Occupy Wall Street helped radicalize a generation, paving the way for the resurgence of socialism as a significant movement in the United States and influencing support for figures like Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020.
What the Float is not a revolutionary movement in the traditional sense. While Floating can evoke a sense of radical freedom, its primary aim is to offer a joyful and liberating experience. Yet, my participation in Floats, concurrent with my growing political engagement, prompted reflection on how radicalization is intrinsically linked to imagination and emotion. It also highlighted the vulnerability inherent in acknowledging the influence of our surroundings and social interactions. I perceive Floating, akin to the dérive or détournement, as a means of extending a radical sensibility into unexpected spaces and among diverse individuals. Floats share this quality with other forms of mobile celebrations, such as Second Line parades, Puerto Rican parrandas, or wassailing in the British Isles. In these collective activities, the distinction between observer and participant blurs. Individuals can spontaneously join, and onlookers are drawn into a temporary community of revelers, all encouraged to dance dance dance.
For those participating in these joyous gatherings, space transforms into an arena for greater freedom of movement and expression. Reflecting on a decade of Floats, Libowitz observed:
Some people will see it as a public event, a performative thing where they get to strut their stuff and show off their dance moves or their wild outfits or their general fearlessness to anyone who passes by. Other people are more drawn to the privacy of large crowds, where if you drift to the middle, you’re completely invisible no matter how brightly you’re glowing… You can also be absolutely alone in your own world.
I find floating liberating because it allows me to embody all these facets throughout a single three-hour adventure. I might begin a Float feeling reserved, seeking anonymity within the dancing crowd, then transition to observing from the periphery, watching the amused reactions of street vendors, and ultimately conclude the evening performing jetés across 6th Avenue, playfully blowing kisses to intrigued tourists, all while we dance dance dance.
This fluidity of movement resonates with the essence of a communitarian society. Karl Marx famously wrote that under communism, individuals would not be confined to a single occupation for survival. Instead, we could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as [we] have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” Activities like Float offer a glimpse into this unbound existence. They ignite a longing for a more equitable world and fuel the desire to actively work towards its realization, and in the meantime, and we dance dance dance.
Today, many of the commercial spaces we danced through during Floats stand vacant. In the summer of 2020, hundreds of thousands marched past these locations, protesting the tragic deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Simultaneously, street dancing became an integral part of city life. The boundaries between protest and celebration blurred. Some summer nights, entire neighborhoods transformed into spontaneous raves. For a fleeting period, the separation between performers and audience dissolved. There were no passive observers, only participants. There was nothing to consume, only shared experience. Everyone was on a dérive. Floating, in its structured form, became almost redundant. The city itself became the Float, and we dance dance dance together in the streets.
