By Cat Lewis
Ali Farrall was the first person I saw when I walked into a warehouse party in London. The room had new-night energy, the night just beginning, the sound system just warming up. Ali Farall, a queer, cross-modal artist, was in the middle of a marathon dance performance on an elevated stage—three hours in, many more to go.
She wore a black and white catsuit with disco lights on her wrists and had a video camera trained on her.
“I can’t tell you how much I hated that performance,” she later tells me. That night, she danced without stopping for more than twelve hours.
When I sit with Ali Farrall, she explains the brief of her work.
It “explores collective and communal experience,” she says. We order drinks as she tells me about the many materials and practices in her art, including—but not limited to—painting, poetry, performance, installation, and found objects.
She draws on her nightlife experiences and uses her art to examine the “architecture of human connection.” I wonder what that means.
After talking and drinking with her, I learn it means, more or less, that her art is about dance floors and the myriad conflicting, difficult, dark, beautiful, strange, and ultimately fleeting human connections that happen on them.
“I feel most human on a dance floor. Total union with people around me, fully in myself and my body.”
She adds, “The dance floor is powerful. With so much changing all the time in the world, the feeling of a dance floor is always a place of truth.”
It’s a feeling I recognise, even if I don’t have the words for it as she does—that dissolving of self that the buzz of bodies dancing to a beat can bring.
Over the last few years, Ali Farrall’s art has led her to look deeper into our human need for this experience.
Why do you think humans love dance floors?
“I looked at studies from researchers at Oxford and Cambridge on why we enjoy collective dance, and why people come together for experiences like this,” she tells me.
“Their research was based on French sociologist Émile Durkheim. He studied why humans get together and hold festivals and rituals, why we celebrate, why we eat together, and why we dance together.”
She is eager and excited as she speaks. “Some theorists consider collective dance to be a war dance, similar to animals that huddle together to make themselves look bigger to predators. They suggest we come together for protection.”
It seems logical, but she explains that Durkheim actually flipped that narrative.
“We need dance floors because we are highly social beings. More than any other animal on the planet. We need them because we need each other.”
Ali Farrall explains how other mammals build bonds—and in doing so, shows how she approaches both dance floors and her work. It’s from a studied, academic lens.
“Monkeys and primates socialise with activities like grooming. But humans have more social ties than any other mammal, so we need a social ritual that works at scale, such as collective dance.”
“Dance allows us to say, ‘I see you’ by moving in union with you.”
Ali Farrall tells me that what humans don’t necessarily notice is how much we mirror each other, especially in clubs and social spaces—how much we copy others’ movements and behaviour to match them and connect with them.
“Mirroring is a strong way to build social bonds,” she says. “And, arguably, mirroring is all that collective dance is.”
This, she says, is “why collective dance feels so good. It allows us to bond and socialise at scale. If you’re at a festival, thousands of people dancing, there’s something in that mirrored, repetitive movement that makes us feel bonded.”
It’s clear what a profound effect these findings had on her:
“I’ve thought so much about how we dance together at parties, festivals, birthdays, and weddings. We instinctually need to connect. So when that’s broken, what does it feel like? I wanted my work to draw on that question.”
“Using this theory of bonding through collective dance, my recent work has played with disrupting that connection,” Ali Farrall says. “I want to see how that affects the viewer and draw attention to its importance.”
Where do you find inspiration?
Ali Farrall describes herself primarily as a collage artist. Her practice grew from love for her community—artists, performers, musicians, makers—and the creativity they share. This inspired her ideas about togetherness and ritual.
“My friends and I hold a festival each spring,” she tells me. “It’s called Oddfolk. We revel and delight in all the niche skills we’ve spent so much time developing.”
The festival, she says, is “one place where we purely enjoy art and play together. We forget the hustle of life. It’s a lot of big community players just being, breathing, and feeling the community they participate in.”
Oddfolk—which has no website and is organised largely by word of mouth—has inspired much of Ali Farrall’s art, including her dissertation, which is titled “The Gaga Carnival of Oddfolk.”
In it, “I use the festival as a basis for my art and as a metaphor for my practice. The process of collective creating in the moment, as well as building and taking down the festival, echoes the process of creative destruction in my work.”
“We play. We put things up. We tear things down. Nothing an artist does happens in isolation. It depends on others.”
Ali tells me festivals inspire her to look at things from a different angle. “I’m constantly asking myself how to try new things. For me, a festival encourages that.”
Tell me about your dissertation.
The “gaga” of her dissertation is from feminist theory, not just the pop singer.
“Gaga feminism is from feminist theorist Jack Halberstam,” Ali Farrall tells me. “The next iteration of feminism is a radical abolishment of constructs. It’s messy, playful, and wild.”
A key difference of Gaga Feminism, she says, is “the focus on all social constructs, such as gender and sexuality, being questioned, distorted, and played with to show their irrelevancy in real terms.”
It’s a bit over my head, but she says that working on her dissertation allowed Ali to explore the separation of queerness from sexuality.
“There’s a big difference between gay and queer. You can be gay but not necessarily have a queer way of thinking. Looking at these systemic structures and going, hang on, this is bullshit, right? That’s a queer way to see the world.”
She knows not every gay person thinks like this.
“Queering as a verb means looking at things differently, in the sense of queering the perspective of something. It’s different.”
We discuss how people, unavoidably, make conclusions about someone’s point of view based on their sexual orientation.
“If you’re someone who sleeps with people of the same gender, you’ve already broken down a structure, which can lead to an expansive way of thinking. But for some people, it doesn’t. But I have a strong attraction to people with this mental elasticity.”
How does your art connect to festival culture?
The festival wristband was Ali Farrall’s most recent material exploration.
“They’re cheap, colourful, disposable, and saturated with collective memory.”
“Festival wristbands feature a lot in my art. I first introduced them as a theme of connection. Connected in a paper-chain fashion, they are a symbol of my community.”
She enjoys how interactive her installations can be.
“I did a large piece titled ‘Viva Forever’ where participants could add to the chains and build on them. I did another piece titled ‘Ever Lasting Like the Sun’, where the chains connected to a maypole, with singing and dancing around it.”
This piece involved twelve participants to guide the audience through the immersive experience. “It was quite pagan and punk. It had a ridiculousness to it, with an edge of sincerity.”
How do people react to your work?
She laughs and describes the range of reactions, particularly to the “maypole” installation, from highly emotional to others just laughing a lot.
“I love those opposing reactions. I wanted it to be topsy-turvy. Is this funny? Is this real? It felt meaningful to use a ritual that is from our culture. The maypole is very English.”
The maypole dance is a folk tradition thought to have originated in Germany before travelling to the British Isles. Over time, the maypole dance became part of a fertility ritual held in spring, and by the Middle Ages, most villages had an annual celebration involving some version of it. Many rural communities across the UK still do.
Ali Farrall wanted to invert and add meaning to something ancient and English that she feels most people in England no longer have a real or personal connection to.
A lack of relationship with their own culture, she suggests, leaves people feeling displaced and disconnected from their home, and the wristbands and maypole idea were her way of digging into this.
In general, she says, many people from the UK “don’t have a positive relationship with English culture. Normally, if someone is patriotic, people think they’re on the EDL side.”
By EDL, she means the English Defence League, a far-right, Islamophobic organisation active in England from 2009 until the mid-late 2010s.
“Without a positive way to feel and show patriotism, I think, some people begin to feel displaced and careless about their land and their responsibility to it. But we do have beautiful parts of our culture here.”
What was your next piece after the maypole installation?
“The next piece was very intimate. Only around twenty people could view it at a time. It was in a big, octagon-shaped room. I made headpieces from festival wristbands. They were sewn in a way that allows the wearer to dance comfortably in them.”
Making the headpieces was nimble, meticulous, painstaking work.
“Every single one was individually hand-sewn, hundreds of festival wristbands on top of each other. In total, they took around twenty-two hours each to make. I had blisters on my hands. The night before the first show, I was awake until five in the morning, still frantically sewing.”
Ali Farrall is animated as she describes how the participants wore the headpieces. They covered participants’ eyes, leaving them blind to others around them.
At the same time, “an opera singer was performing house music classics and every participant was moving, dancing in their own way and to their own rhythm, ignorant of the music. Nobody could see each other, but every so often they would synchronise their movements in perfect unison, until they broke away and began moving to their own rhythm.”
No spectator would be able to see how the others, blinded and adorned in wristband headdresses, could be in coordination with the others—only Ali Farrall knew. “It was mad!”
Whether Ali Farrall recognised it or not, her art echoed the work of many DJs, musicians, promoters, and festival crew. The late nights, the long hours, the bleeding blisters that no one wearing a wristband to the party would be able to see: the work to create collective joy is often done in solitude.
Let’s go back to where I first saw you performing.
We come back to the stage and the twelve-hour dance—the video camera, and the room that didn’t understand what it was witnessing.
After sitting with her thesis research, Ali Farrall wanted to test it and find out how long other people’s energy could sustain her.
“I’d been thinking about that research and the power that collective energy has on us. I wanted to explore how long I could dance if I were supported by the dance floor. How long could it work? How long could I feed off this energy?”
So, when her friend organised a party, she decided to find out.
“With a lot of the kind of work I’m doing, I just have to fucking go for it. It was one of those moments where I was like, fuck it, just do it, just do a thing.”
And she did—she danced for twelve hours continuously without stopping. “I outlasted the DJs,” she says.
Why did you hate the 12-hour dance performance?
“I’m now realising why I did it, so I guess I’m not hating it as much. The footage is the basis of my current project, which is a video collage.”
If she has any critique of it, it’s this: “It’s not extreme enough. I ask myself, where is the artistry? And there is none.”
She believes she is “nowhere close” to finished with that project yet. “At the time, I was going through a lot of personal shit, and I had no other way to understand or deal with it. I’d been through a big breakup, and my mental health was horrible. My brain was just insane.”
“That was a hectic moment in my life and I had to meet that painful, anxious energy with something else. I had to dance it out.”
What she knows now is the whole experience—the stage, the isolation of dancing alone for hours, the physical input and energetic outpour—is the seed of her next piece of art.
“I feel the anxiety. Our world is super polarised at the moment, and much of the noise and fear and all the terrible things that are happening are driving me insane. I think we all need to dance more.”
How does it physically feel to dance nonstop for twelve hours?
“I realise now that my dancing and the approach I took to it in that extreme way were my way of expressing what was happening internally,” she says. “The way the performance was set up had me isolated onstage. I wasn’t on the floor with everyone. I was being filmed in my own area. It was quite lonely. And it was all about me.”
Ali Farrall’s marathon, solo dancing gave her a deep, first-hand understanding of Émile Durkheim’s theory of bonding and the need to be with others.
“I felt weird after. It was different from what I thought it would be. I’m still building on it.”
Did you always want to be an artist?
“I started in finance when at twenty-two. I stuck it out until I turned twenty-eight,” she says. “It didn’t suit me.”
Growing up in Suffolk, in the east of England, Ali Farrall was surrounded by countryside—no close neighbours, just sisters. Her parents were “pretty busy surviving and earning enough to feed a family.”
Her father was an entrepreneur, and her mother was a drama teacher who took up painting after she retired. Because of this, Ali Farrall saw art as something one comes to later, after life and work.
“When my mum retired, she got diagnosed with cancer. Around that time, my dad also had a secondary heart infection. They both survived, but it was a big realisation.” She sighs: “They got this far through life, then got sick.”
This taught her to look at art differently.
“Do I want to wait for that? Do I want to work in a job that is comfortable and secure, but not fulfilling? At the end of it, you can just get sick. I want to have happiness and meaning now, not later.”
She quit her job in finance, left Suffolk, sold “everything”, bought a van, and drove through Europe for nine months with no plan or destination.
“I left finance in a really dramatic way, like a bad relationship. I had to change. I had no plan, no goal. I just wanted to find meaning and purpose.”
Did the breakaway help?
“After nine months, I was broke and still no closer to any meaning, purpose, or understanding of what I was supposed to be doing. It’s perhaps ridiculous to think you can just go find that.”
Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. Ali moved into her sister’s house, where her two young nieces gave her an extra dose of life.
“To be around children that young for that long and watch them grow and be part of their development, it taught me about community and family. Being around children gives you an element of play back to life, which gets lost in adulthood.”
How did being around kids change you?
“Play puts us back into a beginner’s mind. It takes away ego, especially if you’re making art and want it to look beautiful. Sometimes you stop growing because you’re so fixated on making it look good.”
Adding the element of play was a crucial facet of Ali Farrall’s eventual Art Foundation course and, later, her postgraduate degree.
“You’ve got to make ugly things. That’s what play is. Play teaches you to do things in the moment without perfection.”
How does life feel now?
As we finish up, Ali Farrall tells me how random she feels her life has been. I tell her it seems she’s now exactly where she needs to be.
She’s not sure what’s next—that is, in her words, “kind of the point”—but she knows it involves dancing and working toward a cohesive philosophy of communal dance.
“As an artist, I have many mediums,” she says. “Dance is now just one of my media. But I see it as more than that. I see it as collective joy.”
Ali Farrall lives in North London, UK. Follow Ali Farrall’s work via her website.
Cat Lewis writes on culture, creativity, and the unseen characters of nightlife. Drawn to the subversive, quirky and queer, her writing champions those not usually seen and tells their stories loud and clear.
Images: courtesy of the artist
Edits: Alexander Cheves
