Balance Club Culture Festival – Tensions
November 01.-03. 2024 / Leipzig
BALANCE is back with its sixth edition!
The Balance Club / Culture Festival is coming back to Leipzig after a year’s break. Once again, the interdisciplinary club culture festival will take place in various locations in Leipzig, combining music, discourse and art. For the sixth time, the festival will bring an incomparable curation of internationality, musical finesse and innovation to Saxony.
In the discourse program of the festival I will present an input on 2.11. at 2pm in the Garage Ost on the topic
“Rooms for Resistance: An (incomplete) history of counterculture in the club scene”
In this presentation, selected historical examples will be presented in which emancipatory and resistant practices were tested in the context of techno rave and club culture. Historically, the emergence of countercultures is a consequence and expression of social upheaval, first seen in the context of the US protest movements of the 1960s. The idea of criticism, rejection and the questioning of established values were central to the concept of countercultures, which often went hand in hand with forms of self-organization and alternative structures. The beginnings of disco and house in the USA were already characterized by queer and migrant influences; clubs such as The Loft or Paradise Garage were intended to enable those who were otherwise discriminated against to party safely. And Detroit techno was also about utopias beyond racism and discrimination.
More recently, since the 1990s, the Free Party Movement emerged in England from the activism of squatters, travelers and sound systems as a counter-movement to neoliberal Thatcherism, which is closely linked to the emergence of Free Tekno and Teknivals, which were also tested in Germany. In the same way, anti-parades and demo raves were likewise popular formats of club scenes to engage against neoliberalism, gentrification, patriarchy or right-wing ideologies. What can we learn from the emancipatory and countercultural practices of the past in order to develop sustainable strategies for the present?
Balance remains resistant
The progressive cultural approach has been at the forefront of the festival since its inception. The Balance Festival started in 2018 as a platform for progressive club culture and transformative politics to strengthen marginalized, queer and feminist voices in club culture – especially in East Germany. The interdisciplinary club culture festival last took place in 2022 with over 50 international and local artists and speakers from the fields of music, art and discourse. This edition was characterized by questions of post-pandemic cultural creation.
In 2024, the Balance Festival is going on the offensive in times of economic and political tensions and a socio-political situation that increasingly threatens such progressive ideas: this year’s festival motto “Tensions” asks about tensions – but also about possibilities for encounters and moving on. Balance is convinced that club culture has often emerged from such tensions and has always been a place of refuge, a place where we can encounter a different reality, away from everyday dystopias. As an event collective, we believe that it is now more important than ever to reclaim clubs as places of counterculture for queer, feminist, anti-capitalist and decolonial utopias, untouched by the commercialization of nightlife. This is another reason why admission prices remain low and the discourse program free of charge.
All artists & program:
