Walking into a basement club in Camden, the sound of the guitar hits you in the gut, along with the singer’s full-throated, death-metal growl. In the middle of the crowd is a circle of thrashing bodies, hair flying, limbs everywhere, bouncing off each other. The mosh pit. “I got flung about five feet earlier tonight but people pick you back up,” one of them, Jake, tells me. “It’s a good way to get out the stress of the week.”
“Friendly violence,” is how gig-goers James and Angelina describe the energy of the pit. “Achy feet, chafing, people’s sweat dripping from the ceiling,” adds their friend Sam wryly. “It’s not altogether pleasant, but it’s just what you’re compelled to do when you hear the music.”
Rachel Ní Bhraonáin knows this feeling, but for her it’s a recent discovery. A few years ago, her boyfriend came back from a Slayer gig, having injured himself in a mosh pit. She couldn’t believe he would put his body through that, whereas he couldn’t wait to get back out there. As a dancer and aerialist, someone who uses her physicality to understand the world, 31-year-old Ní Bhraonáin couldn’t leave it there.
“It just made me curious about why people do this,” she says. She applied for a small pot of local funding (she lives in Waterford, Ireland) to do some research. “It snowballed from there and became completely fascinating.” Soon Ní Bhraonáin was in the pit herself. “I was nervous the first time,” she says. “But it just made me laugh and laugh, I get into hysterical giggles.”
The result of all this research, and moshing, is a new dance-theatre piece that has its UK premiere at the Norfolk & Norwich festival this week. Mosh, written and directed by Ní Bhraonáin and choreographed by Robyn Byrne, investigates the archetypes, politics and behaviour of the mosh pit. If you thought it was just people mindlessly throwing themselves around, pogoing violently and slamming into each other, well, there’s a bit of that, but a lot more, too. Ní Bhraonáin’s reading took her deep into sociology, crowd behaviour and edgework, which she explains as “the need to put yourself in a risky situation to feel in control of your life and to feel ownership. Even to break out of capitalist society.”
She looked at the work of American physicist Jesse Silverberg, who analysed mosh pits and compared the way moshers moved and bounced off each other to molecules in a gas. She delved into emergence theory, and also the butterfly effect. But Mosh is not a lecture. The cast of five re-create some of the feeling of being in the pit, soundtracked by the voices of metal fans, with Ní Bhraonáin’s own experiences of going to gigs woven in. “I’m not a big metalhead,” she says, “and before I started researching I thought the stereotype was violence and aggression, hyper-masculinity. But it’s actually quite a gorgeous community of people. They’re very friendly, very inclusive.” She admits that from the women she spoke to, there could be two sides to their experience, “but mostly they felt welcome”.
Ní Bhraonáin tells stories she heard about people losing things in the crush – wallets, glasses, shoes – “and they get held up over their heads, like they’re conducting a lost and found. There’s one guy who lost a shoe and they all banded together to help him and put it back on him like Cinderella.” And she talks about how the crowd adapts depending on who’s in it, matching the force and energy of the people around them, adjusting to Ní Bhraonáin’s smaller frame, for example. “It’s like contact improvisation,” she says, referring to the contemporary dance form where partners respond to each other in the moment. More than something mindless, there’s physical communication going on there. “It is a dance form,” says Ní Bhraonáin, “And I think that didn’t occur to me until I started looking into it. It’s like a folk dance.”
On her nights out, she observed different characters who played different roles in the crowd, nicknaming them. There’s the Pit Bull, whose wild energy gets the show going and infects everyone else; the Pit Protectors, looking after the edges of the crowd; the Karate Choppers, coming from the more punk/hardcore scene (Angelina describes them as “less pushy, more punchy”); and the Pit Lieutenants, longtime fans of the band, with a sense of ownership and responsibility for everyone having a good time.
Back in Camden, Sam, who’s a bodybuilder, admits his role is usually to pick people up when they fall over. He’s watching from the sidelines tonight, a low-key midweek gig, but looking across the crowd to the circle of younger fans throwing themselves about. It’s chaotic but their faces are beaming. “Half my best mates I’ve met in pits,” says Jake. It’s definitely a shortcut to intimacy, sharing an intense experience and instant connection. “I can go in the pit and my week’s all better,” he says, then dashes off back into the crowd.
Mosh is at Epic Studios, Norwich, 23-25 May. Norfolk & Norwich festival runs until 26 May.
