IN MOTION

Darkened basements and pulsating speakers and sweaty bodies. That’s what Sonya Tayeh remembers about the moment she realised that she was going to dance forever. She was 22 and living in Detroit, US, and unsure about how the rest of her life was going to look. But there was one thing that she did know: she loved to move.

Most evenings, Tayeh would make her way to an underground club and park herself next to the DJ booth. Techno was her poison of choice. One night, lost in the oblivion of an endless beat, she turned and gazed around the room. “I saw this sea of people,” Tayeh recalls. Speaking over Zoom, early in the morning before she heads to the studio, Tayeh is passionate and animated. As she recounts the energy of that night she rolls her body, indicating a sea of people moving as one. “From all walks of life, all parts of the world, connecting in this way,” she adds. “I thought: ‘This is