§ YOLOROBICS

YOLOROBICS is an ongoing performance and social research project examining how collective states are produced through sound, movement, timing, and spatial arrangement.

Initiated in 2011, the project operates through a series of durational gatherings staged in clubs, informal venues, and temporary sites across the United States. Each iteration functions as both an event and a study: an attempt to understand how bodies synchronize, how attention circulates, and how environments shape perception under conditions of intensity.

The project treats nightlife as a technical system.

Rather than approaching the dance floor as a space of expression or subculture, YOLOROBICS approaches it as infrastructure. Sound systems, lighting, architectural constraints, crowd density, and temporal pacing form a coupled network that organizes behavior and sensation. These elements are composed deliberately. Nothing is neutral. Small changes in volume, tempo, or spatial flow produce measurable shifts in collective dynamics.

Central to the work is an interest in ekstasis as displacement.

Here, ekstasis is understood not as excess or transcendence, but as a temporary reorientation of attention away from stable identity and toward distributed, relational experience. This displacement is produced through repetition, exhaustion, rhythmic entrainment, and mutual responsiveness. It is neither accidental nor guaranteed. It depends on conditions.

Each iteration is structured dramaturgically.

Drawing on performance and movement research, YOLOROBICS is composed through arcs of arrival, accumulation, rupture, suspension, and release. These phases are not narrative but operational. They regulate energy, attention, and proximity. The work is concerned as much with transitions and aftermath as with moments of peak intensity.

Participants engage the space through constructed personas, costuming, and altered modes of address. These practices are treated as functional tools rather than expressions of identity. They create distance from habitual social scripts and enable alternative forms of interaction to emerge. The goal is not self-expression, but reconfiguration.

Over time, the project has developed as a longitudinal study of collective embodiment.

It examines how consent is negotiated in large groups, how care operates under pressure, and how vulnerability is managed in public, high-stimulation environments. Documentation, participant feedback, and iterative redesign inform ongoing development. Each event feeds forward into the next.

YOLOROBICS has taken place in venues including Public Works and The STUD in San Francisco, as well as distributed underground spaces throughout Utah and California. Many iterations occur in private homes or outdoors—and some are intentionally left undocumented. Early gatherings held on BYU campus were particularly cautious in this regard: gathering as queer people in that context carried real risk, and the work survived in part through discretion. Its structure remains adaptable, responding to architectural, social, and cultural constraints rather than imposing a fixed format.

As a practice, YOLOROBICS exists between performance, social sculpture, and field research. It treats nightlife as a site of experimentation in collective perception and coordination. It asks how shared states can be cultivated without coercion, how intensity can be sustained without collapse, and how temporary forms of social organization emerge under designed conditions.

The project does not aim at catharsis or transcendence. It aims at understanding.

---

---

With deep gratitude to the people who made YOLOROBICS possible and sustainable: Keebee and YOLA, the original space holders and practitioners, butoh artists who have been part of the group from the beginning—for their love, support, mutual aid, and great humor; Coco/Materia, our incredible selector; and Circe, healing, charming, and dear. This would not have happened, and could not have been sustained this long, without them.