B for Becoming
Power Dance Club at Kreuzwerk, 1 January 2026
Around the time my health shattered last summer, I had two weird club-related experiences that drew me towards the Gateway Process: basically, towards astral projection or having an out-of-body experience. I’ll dig into that more when I can muster the energy, but for now suffice to say it organically emerged from where Berlin clubland has landed me, i.e., dancing as meditation.
There were a million parties on in Berlin on New Year’s Day but I wasn’t feeling it. After Christmas in Ireland I was frazzled. My central nervous system having tanked, I felt unfit for much more than reading quietly or venturing out to meet a friend to talk about weird things over a coffee.
However, one of my new year’s resolutions was to embrace chance. So, on the cold morning of 1 January, I flipped a tarot card over. The card was auspicious: the Six of Cups. It signifies a return to childlike play.
In the deck I have, gifted by a now ex-friend, the Six of Cups is re-fashioned as Becoming-Vegetal: the submission to Nature’s voracious becoming, which, through time passing, both creates and destroys us. In Western philosophy, being and becoming are defined in contradistinction: being is the steady state; becoming is the underlying, open-ended process of change.
‘The individual is not a definite being, finished upon arrival,’ Muriel Combes explains in Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. ‘It is the partial and provisional result of individuation in that it harbors a preindividual reserve within itself that makes it susceptible to plural individuations.” In other words, we’re always fit to burst and multiply. Or as Gilbert Simondon himself put it: ‘Is not all creation a transgression?’
A nice card for the new year. So I promptly got my shit together, braved the U8 and went to party at Power Dance Club at Kreuzwerk.
How hot and madcap it was. As madcap as an illegal rave where you never know what’s about to happen. ‘Bonkers’ was the word closing DJ Massimiliano Pagliara used for it afterwards, and maybe it doesn’t need much more than that, though I feel a party so fun and intense demands that I give it a try.
You might know that Power Dance Club (PDC) started in Greece before kicking off as well in Berlin. And you might know that over the past year or so, it’s grown to become one of the main queer parties in Berlin. This Silvester edition, though, really flexed its testo biceps. It wasn’t just the party’s scale, a scale on a par with (inevitable reference) Berghain, twenty DJs scattered across four spaces in a labyrinthine venue. Nor was it the hopeful/lamenting hours-long queue of hundreds of bodies willing to freeze their asses off to get inside. More, I was struck by how this edition of PDC represented a kind of grassroots queer collectives strike back! setup, a cute conglomerate of sorts.
The lineup featured resident DJs not only from PDC but from other notable parties like Cocktail d’Amore, Lecken, Herrensauna, Mala Junta and PDA. As a result, apparently Berghain was largely bereft of queers for its New Year’s Party, and this not long after Ben Klock drew some ire around town for posing in front of the building with celebrity friends Harry Styles and Zoe Kravitz, as if club culture’s ultimate aim should be to make the pages of Hello! magazine. (Hey, a reminder to go buy my book, the last chapter of which dwells on Berghain’s celebrity-embracing-conspicuous-consumption era.) Kreuzwerk struck me as exactly what you hear about when misty-eyed people reminisce about the old Ostgut (unpretentious gay male-dominated down-at-heel party with quality music). A changing of the guard? Only if PDC leans more into techno bookings.
Of PDC’s five spaces, I spent most of the time in the house-music space the Green House. It was roasting under the glass ceiling and condensation gushed from the walls. DJing while I was there were DHC and then Luigi Di Venere b2b Stathis, mostly playing pounding house music to the smiling faces. When I bumped into one or two friends they didn’t recognise me, which I always take as a compliment.
What was it like? There were groups of athletic men in harnesses. There were chubby bearded dudes with hairy backs. There were transwomen serving body. There were butch dykes. There was OMG gossip being shared. There were bumps being shared. There were people searching for their lost phone. There was a disregarded pair of sunglasses. There were dudes naked. There was cock-sucking being interrupted to say hello to a passing friend then resuming. There were party girls with their fringes stuck to balmy foreheads, there were tattooed book-sellers with hoop ear-rings, there were day-trippers, and there was the odd weirdo writer.
My spot was attained by ascending a rickety scaffolding staircase to an upper balcony going around the dancefloor like a proscenium, a decking path with wooden-bench seating at back and a railing in front, where I got the bright idea, given the heaving mass below, of dancing up on top of the bench, head not far from the ceiling, so that in this debauch of very high people I became the highest person, dancing on a summit with a view below of the dancefloor thick with smiling bodies, molten with sweat and sexiness, now and again imagining myself plummeting dizzily down into the fiery abyss like the ancient philosopher Empedocles who threw himself into Mount Etna.
‘For before this,’ Empedocles said (preaching reincarnation), ‘I was born once a boy, and a maiden, and a plant, and a bird, and a darting fish in the sea.’ New year, new you (or new un-you).
Finding myself disabled these past months has been unpleasant. My malady is a central nervous system (CNS) collapse. It has put me in mind of what Sinead Gleeson wrote eloquently about how we barely notice the body until one day something goes amiss, after which we can never forget it, as the body now stands in the way of everything. My CNS malady is a scratchy chalk-outline double of a self. And since my CNS is constantly overloading, going up and down to that balcony could make me feel like I was Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, sensory data becoming thousands of charged smithereens taxing my self-coherence.
Part of me can’t help fancifully relating this malady to the autofiction book I published at the end of the year. Since I’ve publicly made myself a fictional character, the fictional character has entered my body, with this illness the result, befitting how artworks intensify sensation.
But there’s another sense of losing yourself: dancing for hours. That’s a type of losing yourself that brings you back to yourself.
Yes, Power Dance Club was completely packed and the queue was interminable and getting your stuff from the coat check was like getting the last chopper out of Saigon. But for me, it was also a breath of fresh air and a bit of a revelation. It reminded me of Cocktail d’Amore in its Griessmuehle pomp.
My two favourite rooms were the Discoteca and Green House. In the former, Cocktail-resident Richii played a wonderfully weird set of slowed-down crunk, electro, old drum-machine sounds layered over with robotic speech samples, synth-sweeps, bleeps, ket-friendly fare for an audience not all of whom were on ket, and who could spin their arms in this fun room without hitting anyone, till word caught on and then everyone you’d seen elsewhere in the club appeared there, all pleasantly weird.
The Greenhouse was house-music at its rawest and sexiest. It was only after dancing there a while that I noticed the green plastic vine-plants hanging from the ceiling. Distending downwards to where the melee of sweating bodies danced, they recalled the becoming-vegetal tarot card that had set my day off.
It’s nature’s very nature to evade any restriction to a fixed identity — even, paradoxically, to its own fixed identity (‘That is the only way Nature operates – against itself’, Deleuze and Guattari write). A lesson for us. In club environments like these, subtly, discreetly, outside of eyeshot and conscious mind, newness can surge up. That’s how I’ve experienced it anyway: the club as where shoots burst through the soil surface of the everyday and begin to invent anew: new selves, new mindsets, new collectives, new identities, new non-identities. Or:
Dancing girl: transformation
Of all transience into steps
. . . as Rilke writes in the Sonnets to Orpheus.
Power Dance Club, Silvester, tracks heard
This time I made a YouTube playlist. If you listen to it on the Brave browser app, you won’t get any annoying ads.
Luv by Menta Sauce
Big Brother UK TV Theme (GRAYED OUT/DEEP HOUSE MIX) by Elementfour
Disco Royale by Porn Jacker
I Called U (Why’d You Fall) by Lil Louis
You Better (Es Cavelett Mix) [Mixed] by Mount Rushmore & The Knack
Convoy by Jark Prongo
Open Up (Slow Version) by Kza (Force Of Nature)
All Right by Bwh
Orot Levanim by Plazmot
Ocean Of Crime (Fabrizio Mammarella Remix) by Stage
Dora (Lo Kindre Remix) by Zillas on Acid & Lo Kindre
Clubfoot by Gearmaster
Hey Kiss Kiss by Oshana
Frequency Building (Original Mix) by Get F**ked
Rhythm 11 by DEADWALKMAN
Echo by Dean
Strokes Of Midnight (Original Mix) by Joy Marquez
Finding Paradise (Infectious Mix) by Ferry B
An Invisible Fire, Working in Secret by Mateo Hurtad
Drone by Błażej Malinowski
Unforgiving by Błażej Malinowski
Out of Control by DJ Hell
Sorry Not Sorry (Bliss Inc. Remix) by Zombies In Miami
Rock It by Denis Sulta
Percussion Obsession by Otaku
Dancing in the Dark (Galactica Re-Mix) by Mike Mareen
Mind Games by Gregory S.
Lovely