Paper short abstract:

This paper will work from my PHD research/fieldwork on bush doofs, focusing particularly on the psychedelic experience in the dance space and how it generates forms of ecstatic consciousness through electronic dance music, dance and drugs.

Paper long abstract:

I am interested in how the aesthetic experience in the dance space at a bush doof works and how psychedelic moments are created, not through the simple use of psychoactive substances, but through musical structures and the structures of the dance space itself.

I will focus on the various ritual dynamics in the dance space, such as music, lights, dance, drugs, to describe the ways in which psychedelic experience is structured at a doof.

I see the dance space as, obviously, about dancing and the intertwining of human movement and musical movement to produce particular ecstatic states. However, following Deleuze's Cinema books, I focus on the ways in which the dance space can create psychedelic states beyond sensory-motor linkages (the entrainment of humans to music through dance), which move beyond the danced imagining of time towards an experience of time in itself (Deleuze's the time-image), which is the most psychedelic moment in the dance space!