The Eeriness of the 2020 Disco Revival
My aches and chills started on the same day that I’d planned on mingling with strangers to the music of Donna Summer. On March 11, the Brooklyn Museum held an opening party for an exhibit on Studio 54, the iconic ’70s nightclub where Bianca Jagger once rode around on a horse led by a naked model. But headlines about the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S. got worse over the course of the day, as did the feelings of physical ickiness that I now know was the onset of a mild case of the virus. I stayed home, and both museums and dance floors soon shut down citywide. Cooped up over the past nine months, the closest I’ve gotten to the Studio 54 experience has been watching videos about it online. “The music, the sound system, was so calibrated that it would just blow through your body,” the veteran party photographer Rose Hartman reminisces in a clip promoting the exhibit. “You just had to start moving.”
The notion of such a sound system—and the concerts, clubs, and parties it could power—has come to feel almost mythological this year. On the long list of things thwarted by the pandemic, the freedom to move our bodies together has . You can, in fact, tell its significance because 2020 was not the year that dancing died. It was actually the year.)
