Nightscapes by Absolut: Dance Floor on Fire

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Dance floors host some of our most public, yet intimate moments. A good deal of the happy mistakes you will make in your young adult life will take place on a dance floor – whether in the form of a random encounter or an executive decision. Regardless of what happens on the dance floor, you know it will impact the rest of the evening's events.

Absolut understood the power of dance floor activity to the point where they brought an artist's vision of an interactive, pyrotechnic dance floor to the bush outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. The conventional dance floor was transformed to say the least.

Forgoing the usual approach of grasping at the past by trying to imitate a famous dance floor like Studio 54, Absolut created something new. Maybe those iconic dance floors of yore were ideal…but in the 1970s. Now over 40 years in the past, that sort of thing is the olive in a cocktail of nostalgia, and not the solution for today's club goer.

In this video, we witness the creation of the world's first truly interactive dance floor, giving the world something it hasn't quite seen before. Utilizing a group of experts who casually reference 'normal explosions', pyrotechnics, and 'massive triggered lighting', we hear how creating a mind-blowing crowd experience is an art as well as a science.

Charles Gadeken is an interactive artist, who makes art that allows participants to be a part of the dialogue. In this case, that dialogue is the physical language of dance, one of the purest and oldest forms of human interaction. (Ever think that maybe, just maybe, it's a literal mating dance you're doing? Don't think too hard about it.) Inside of a custom-built glass cube, the crowd became the focus at Absolut Nights in South Africa. For one night only, the crowd's jumping, footwork, and rhythmic movements triggered fireworks that lit up the South African bush and sparkled against the pop-up cube's glass and mirror walls. Watch below, as human potential is unlocked with literally explosive results.