Alex Deforce’s  The Slow Must Go On brings slow dancing back to life. It is a kind of poetic prom night. A space where dancing is not content. Anti-TikTok. Anti-performance.
An anti-mosh pit. Where the mosh pit is chaos, aggression and centrifugal energy, the slow pit becomes
a vortex of tenderness — centripetal, with poetry / the poet at its centre:
a protest against the swipe,
an exercise in staying.
A marathon of closeness.
The mosh pit pushes you away.
The slow pit holds you tight.

 
The evolution of slow dancing tells the story of four generations with radically different views on intimacy. In the 1950s and 1960s, baby boomers danced at sock hops where chaperones stood on the dance floor to prevent ‘indecent’ behaviour. ‘Leave room for Jesus’ was the rule; a Bible-width distance between dance partners. A boy who asked for a slow dance suggested serious interest, while fast dances were "just friendly".

 
The 80s power ballad was the soundtrack to shuffling, but also to doom. While everyone held each other to the strains of ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ or "I Want to Know What Love Is," the shadow of the mushroom cloud hung over their heads. The Cold War produced its own unheimlichkeit: every embrace could be the last. 
The German word Weltschmerz took on a nuclear undertone in those decades. The pain of the world was no longer romantic-philosophical: the world could really come to an end. In that context, slow dancing became subversive. Bodies holding each other while Reagan and Gorbachev refused to shake hands. The party as a shelter. The parish centre as a bunker of tenderness.

 
Four decades later, that unheimlichkeit is returning. Again, the threat of war. Again, the images of missiles. But the party is gone — replaced by scrolling, swiping, and algorithmic isolation? Ballads have become ironic, TikTok clips.

That is precisely why the slow pit is needed now. Not as nostalgia for the 1980s, but as a return to what the power ballad intuitively understood — that in times of existential threat, holding another body is an act of resistance. Not against the bomb. But against indifference. Against the nihilism that says: it doesn't matter anyway. The slow pit revives the promise of the power ballad, stripped of its kitsch but not of its seriousness: that three minutes — or thirty, or three hours — of closeness do matter. That shuffling, just like in 1983, is a refusal to be alone at the end of the world.

 

“To dance is not to be going anywhere"
(Alan Watts)