"Stay Safe/Stay United/Stay In Touch" - Experiential communitas, belonging, and participation in Prague's electronic dance music scene during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

With the social distancing measures related to COVID-19, the party life in the Czech Republic went through major changes. Offline parties were no longer possible within the governmental framework. Practices that previously were self-evident became impossible to maintain. Attendees were pushed to rely on the online possibilities of scene participation or invent novel modes to stay connected. Through an analysis of both online and offline participation, this paper examines how their sense of community and belonging to the electronic dance music (EDM) scene changed during the pandemic. The data was collected via multiple methods. The core of the research is semi-structured interviews, fieldnotes, and netnography. Moreover, data from an online questionnaire was used to triangulate and thicken the findings. This research aimed to outline the core features of a party and the attendees' practices and values that construct or re-enforce belonging and feeling of community. For the analysis, a theoretical framework building on the concepts of communitas by Victor Turner and connectedness by Tim Olaveson was used. The data revealed that a good event heavily relies on the corporeal and physical. Therefore, the term experiential communitas was introduced as a concept which describes this special, sensory-...