On a quiet block in Edgewood, just around the corner from the Dew Drop Inn, sits a loading dock that belongs to culinary incubator Mess Hall. One Sunday evening a month, the industrial space opens its dock door and fills with a small crowd. Folks mingle in the half inside, half outside space over cocktails served in plastic pouches and food served on paper trays, but neither is the main attraction. The people are there to dance.
As the sun sets, the dancing gets going—soundtracked by a mix of DJs who spin records behind bright red subwoofers. The vibe changes month to month and set to set, but loosely falls under the umbrella of American dance music, with an emphasis on disco, house, and techno. Headliners often hail from the cities where those genres were born—Chicago, Detroit, and New York, in particular—though locals always appear on the lineup, too. Big names in dance music, like Philadelphia’s Rich Medina and Baltimore’s Karizma, have come through, but the party maintains a sense of intimacy. Capacity is capped at 135 people. The crowd is a rich mix of genders, backgrounds, and generations: Local DJ Kenny Megan, aka Kenny M, sometimes brings his son William, who just turned 2 and loves to dance—so long as it’s before his 7 p.m. bedtime.
Extended Play is one of a number of independent DIY dance parties that have debuted in unexpected places around D.C. in recent years. Most have emerged following the pandemic, which triggered the closing of a number of iconic dance venues, and gave local DJs and nightlife organizers an unexpected moment of quiet to rethink what the local dance music scene could and should look like. This particular party, created by local DJs Martín Miguel and Sam Park to bring contemporary dance music to an early evening audience in an approachable, intimate venue, got its start in March 2023. “It was an idea I really believed in,” Miguel says. “I felt like it was time to take a chance.”
Miguel, a 33-year-old who grew up in Cathedral Heights and Kensington, Maryland, has been spinning records in D.C. for around a decade. His DJ career has included stints at the Black Cat and Flash, as well as venues that are no longer around, including U Street Music Hall and 18th Street Lounge. At the latter, Miguel hosted a Sunday party for about six years, and worked closely with D.C. house music legend Sam “The Man” Burns. Burns, a D.C. native who championed Chicago-style house music throughout his 40-plus-year career, died unexpectedly in March 2020, right before COVID-19 emerged in full force.
The pandemic went on to strip D.C. of several important dance institutions: The aforementioned U Street Music Hall and 18th Street Lounge closed, as did Velvet Lounge and Dodge City—all spots where up-and-coming DJs used to cut their teeth and experiment with their sound.
“COVID just kind of ruined the ecosystem that we had here in D.C. I feel like maybe Miami and New York bounced back pretty quickly, but D.C. lost venues, and people don’t go out the same way,” Miguel says. “They follow parties or DJs more loyally than they do venues, at this point.”
Valeria, a DJ who grew up in Northern Virginia and performs around D.C. as gabberbitch69, learned how to build a following without the endorsement of a well-known venue before the pandemic, leaning on her Instagram presence as well as fliers and word of mouth. In April 2019, she threw the first installation of her hard-core, high-energy dance music party, 140+ (a name that refers to the beats per minute of their usual music), in Studio Ga Ga, an underground nightlife space that sat above the since-shuttered Asmara Lounge in Adams Morgan. Valeria created the party because she was “craving more” from D.C.’s burgeoning techno scene, she tells City Paper. Not long after its inception, 140+ began collaborating with Friends With Benefits, also known by its acronym FWB, another hard-core party that was started in 2019 by Skyler S.
The 140+ x FWB parties are “leading by example,” Miguel says. “The 140+ and Friends With Benefits crew really disrupted things in a good way by taking matters into their own hands, and just starting to do DIY type events wherever they could get in.” He credits those parties for inspiring him to actualize his own vision with Extended Play—they showed how people can “[create] their own scene,” he says.
Valeria says a “domino effect” in DIY party throwing is increasingly common, and essential to the recent underground scene’s development. “People are seeing that there’s actually cool people here, cool stuff, underground stuff, people with similar mindsets and values, and then it’s just a cycle of inspiring others to start something.”
If you talk to the people creating D.C.’s current underground dance scene, you’ll begin to notice that domino effect everywhere. You’ll also hear DJs and organizers express more interest in collaborating with each other than competing.
“We all have so much respect for each other,” Park of Extended Play says about the various independent dance collectives that have bubbled up over the past few years. “There’s way more mutual respect and collaboration than there was previously, and I really do credit that to these new crews and their invigorated sense and understanding of what nightlife should be like.”
Some of those new nightlife options include Xunt, a queer techno and hyperpop event started by DJ Franxx in 2022, which Valeria calls 140+’s “trans-focused sister party.” Zavier, aka Znorthy, who regularly DJs at 140+ and helps put on Xunt, introduced Ghetto Witchez, an international Latinx techno event, to the District (Zavier teamed up with Xunt and FWB to do so). In addition to Xunt, Franxx and Zavier DJ occasionally for Noxy, a queer techno party (formerly known as Noxeema Jackson) that Ayo and DJ Juana (who hosted the now-defunct Sequence) started in 2021.
Along with running Extended Play, Miguel has been putting on the party For Your Pleasure at Suns Cinema with Michelle Jessup, who DJs as Chelle, since last year. He also recently debuted Wavelength, a dance music event organized with Kabir Khanna, or DJ Koh, who co-runs Hast du Feuer, a popular electronic music party that got started in 2022. Khanna, in addition to coordinating Hast du Feuer collaborations with other parties such as Xunt, is currently a resident at People’s House, a small party in the basement of 18th Street NW’s Vagabond that focuses on ’90s house and UK garage music.
“There’s so many other people like me who have gotten into DJing recently, or have gotten more active and are trying to push themselves, creating their own little parties,” says People’s House host Shabd Khalsa, who started DJing last August after taking a DJ class offered by Extended Play. “Every weekend, I’m seeing more and more little collectives.”
In addition to sharing mutual admiration and often DJs, the District’s DIY dance parties also share equipment. The subwoofers used at Extended Play are co-owned by Miguel, Megan (DJ Kenny M who likes to take his son dancing), and Erik Beith, who DJs as Eddy Bauer (together, Megan and Beith run disco and house music-adjacent party Electric Kingdom). The trio sometimes rent out their sound equipment to 140+ x FWB, Noxy, vinyl party Deep Dive, and the electronic and punk festival ZAP outdoorz, which takes place in West Virginia. Setting up and breaking down the equipment is technical, labor-intensive work that can take around nine hours, Megan says, so they won’t rent to just anyone, but it’s important to them that they minimize the cost for DJ collectives that are just starting out.
“We want it to be something they can afford,” Megan says. He credits the pandemic, and all the closures it triggered, with reminding him of something important: “It’s not guaranteed that we’re always going to have good stuff in D.C. We have to all have a stake in it, and build it together.”
Hast du Feuer’s Khanna expresses a similar community-oriented sentiment while talking about 618, a no-frills venue located above Chinatown Garden on H Street NW that has become one of the de facto homes for D.C.’s underground dance scene in recent years. Lately, it’s been a go-to venue for 140+ x FWB, Hast du Feuer, Noxy, and Wavelength (which recently hosted Soichi Terada, a renowned pioneer of Japanese electronic music, in the space).
Organizers are in charge of everything, including sound and lights, when they take over 618, making it “the epitome of DIY,” Khanna, who helps the venue book DJs and parties, says. “I don’t care about the name of the venue itself becoming big and cool,” Khanna says. “It’s the organizers who make it, so that’s who we’re focusing on.”
They’re also focusing on the people who buy tickets to their events, and how to make them feel comfortable. The term “safe space” came up in nearly every interview for this story, and is something the young people cultivating this wave of DIY dance events in D.C. take seriously. Hast du Feuer has a community monitoring program in place, in which select community members—either people with a background in de-escalation, or Hast du Feuer regulars who want to help out—work in shifts, carrying menstrual products, condoms, Naloxone (a drug used to combat narcotic overdoses), and other items (sometimes gum) that attendees might need. They walk around events ready to hand over whatever’s needed, and keep an eye out for dangerous situations like sexual harassment or over-intoxication. They also work with Celestial Spaces, a Maryland-based harm reduction group who Khanna describes as “an indispensable service to our scene,” on certain events. At Extended Play, a sign next to the dance floor explicitly bans nonconsensual touching, harassment, leering, hate speech, and bigotry (and also song requests).
Park says she’s encouraged to see safety be such a priority at so many of her peers’ parties, because it’s not something she’s always experienced as a DJ and promoter. “A lot of big clubs with big investors in D.C. don’t have their artists’ best interests at heart,” she says.
Organizers have grievances with their own scene, too. Zavier, a D.C. native who grew up in Takoma, would like to see more queer, Latine, and Black representation in the underground community, which is why they’re putting so much energy behind Ghetto Witchez. “People are here to go to Georgetown … and be an intern,” they say. “You have a lot of gentrification happening, where people who might have been into more clubby sounds have been forced outside of D.C.”
Juana, one of the organizers behind Noxy, also worries about gentrification taking a toll on the nature of the District’s underground dance scene. “I hope D.C. doesn’t lose its diversity of perspectives and attitudes, and I hope that the really fun and interesting people that we’ve gotten to party with over the years aren’t priced out of the city,” she says. “It’s easy for things to lose steam when most people’s idea of fun is going to brunch.”
It’s also easy for things to lose steam when the people driving these parties are working full-time jobs, and tapping into their own time and money to make them happen, as is the case with almost all the DJs and organizers mentioned in this story, many of whom expressed experiencing burnout from party planning. Hosting an event is a time-consuming, often costly venture. It might involve booking a venue, booking DJs (that sometimes, if they’re based out of town, need transportation costs covered), and organizing lighting, refreshments, and sound, which can take hours of manual labor.
Many DIY parties charge a cover to sustain these costs. Tickets to Extended Play, for example, range from $20 to $40, all of which goes back into the party’s expenses, which include paying DJs, providing bartenders with a tip guarantee, and flying talent into town.
“Last year, I probably lost $15,000 throwing the event,” Miguel says, a number that includes his contribution to the high-quality sound system that powers Extended Play, Electric Kingdom, and other local parties. “But it didn’t feel like a loss to me, necessarily. It felt like I made an investment in something that I wanted to see in D.C.”
This year, Extended Play is closer to breaking even, Miguel says, though the summer has been a bit slow. “It’s not about the money,” he says. “As long as it’s financially viable, I want to keep doing it.
Attendees of 140+ x FWB, which sells tickets that start around $10, have asked Valeria if DJing and throwing parties is her full-time job. “I’m so shook every time I get that question,” she says. “With the level of production that we do, and the level of effort we put into it, I think people have this idea that we are able to make money off of it. But we actually put so much free labor and time into it to make it what it is.”
Sometimes, Valeria says, she stops to ask herself if she’s burning out.
“But then it’s peak time and you see the heads of everyone … with the fog in the background and all the colorful lights,” she says. “Seeing all those people in a room who wouldn’t be together otherwise, just because we decided to throw a silly turbo party or whatever—that’s what keeps me going every time.”
Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified Michelle Jessup. This version has been corrected.