Last night my friend, Jonathan, and I joined the Decentralized Dance Party (DDP) and had a blast. The premise of the DDP is to have a mobile dance party by eliminating the large equipment like speakers. The DJs achieve this by transmitting the music over the radio and the people at the DDP have boomboxes tuned to the frequency they are using. Everyone is encouraged to bring their own radios but the hosts (Tom and Gary) also provide some. The boomboxes they provide are awesome some are normal ones but a lot of them are suitcases and briefcases modified with speakers.
We started under the south side end of the 1st street bridge. It took awhile to get started and there were supposed to be at least 3,000 people but the rain kept a lot of them home so there were fewer than a thousand people attending. The theme was exercise so everyone dressed in workout clothing. Once it got going it was awesome. We would walk/dance to different locations the hosts had picked and dance for awhile there before moving on. We first stopped in front of the Palmer Events Center, then went to the old power plant by crossing the Lamar pedestrian bridge, then to the steps of city hall, finally along 6th street. Almost all the songs played were ones I knew which was great. There were a lot of classics like Eye of the Tiger, Bohemian Rhapsody, YMCA, and Don’t Stop Believing and there were artists I hadn’t heard in awhile like Darude and Scooter. There was a guy on stilts which was amazing since there was a lot difficult terrain and near the end on 6th street, a guy went crowd surfing on a surf board so was able to stand up.