Night Two: Body Electric

Brooklyn, 5:23 p.m. | Two hours before Night Two

It began quietly.

Recea stood barefoot at the back entrance, watching guests leave their phones in small velvet bags at the door. The mood tonight was different: less careful curiosity, more quiet anticipation. The word had spread from the first night’s whispered performance, and everyone entering knew they were walking into something rare.

Inside, the industrial space pulsed softly, walls shifting under projections like slow, dreamy breaths. Fog curled at ankle-height. Recea’s carefully layered bass and breath loops wrapped around bodies without edges, like velvet in the dark.

Recea stepped into the side room, pulling the door shut behind her to dull the faint echo of soundcheck. She leaned back against the cool concrete wall, phone pressed to her ear as the line clicked.

“Hey, baby girl,” her father’s warm voice came through, music humming softly in the background. “How’d it go last night?”

Recea exhaled, smiling. “Hey, Dad. It was good. Actually, really good.”

Charles laughed, low and knowing. “You sound surprised.”

“A little,” Recea admitted. “I don’t know. The whole thing was experimental. I thought maybe people wouldn’t get it. But they did. The room felt…alive, almost.”

“You know,” he said softly, “your mama always said you had a way of turning silence into something special. Even when you were tiny. Like, people just wanted to stop and listen.”

Recea felt her chest warm slightly, her throat tightening in a good way. “You’re gonna make me cry, and I have makeup on already.”

Charles chuckled. “That’s my job!. So, what about tonight? Same energy, or you switching it up?”

Recea paused, shifting on her feet. “Tonight’s different. Last night was for stillness. Tonight’s about movement. About letting go.”

“Good,” he said, sounding proud. “You need both. People don’t dance enough these days anyway.”

“You don’t dance at all,” Recea teased gently.

“That’s not the point,” he laughed. “You’re the one with rhythm, not me.”

She smiled softly into the phone, glancing toward the door as the noise picked up outside again. “I gotta head back, Dad. They’re about to open doors.”

“Alright, love. Enjoy tonight, okay? No stressing.”

“I’ll try,” Recea said. “Talk tomorrow?”

“You know it.”

She lingered on the line a beat longer. “Love you, Dad.”

“Love you too. Go make ’em dance.”

Recea ended the call and stood still for just another second, smiling to herself before stepping back out into the room she’d built.

As midnight passed, Recea stepped into the center of the room, no stage, no spotlight, but just a moment. The room went still, air holding itself. She raised one hand, and the sound shifted. Deepened. Expanded. Until it pressed into every chest and palm in the space.

Then she smiled, nodded gently, and the beats fell into a rhythm. It pulled feet from floor, and bodies into motion. What had felt quiet became a rave; slow, deep, and impossible to photograph. Recea moved through it all with her eyes closed, only guided by the music and the pulse of a room she’d transformed.

By the end of the night, nobody asked how long they’d been dancing. It didn’t matter. For a few hours, Recea had built a room where bodies, sound, and feeling melted together.

No corners. No edges. Just rhythm and breath.

The Morning After

Sunday, 11:14 a.m. | A Diner Somewhere Diner in Ridgewood

They’d barely slept.

Recea sat curled into the diner booth with oversized sunglasses covering her eyes and a hoodie pulled halfway up over last night’s hair. Around the table, four of her closest friends were slumped in various states of gentle disrepair, sipping watery coffee from chipped mugs, laughing and groaning in equal measure.

“This,” Maya declared dramatically, pointing at her plate of questionable hash browns, “is healing.”

“The diner or the hangover?” Recea asked, smiling behind her glasses.

“Yes,” Maya said. “Both.”

The crew laughed. 

Next to her, Eli leaned back, eyes half-shut. “Honestly, Rece, whatever that was last night, it was amazing. My body is still catching up. I think I left a part of my brain in that room.”

Across the booth, Syd laughed softly. “I swear there was a moment when I completely forgot I was even in New York. Like, i was freaking out for a second because I thought I was back in Berlin on a bender” , he remarked in an irish accent. 

Recea shook her head slowly, sipping from her mug. “It was the room, the energy. That was the collective.”

Kaya, with her forehead resting on her folded arms, nodded slightly. “That room was spiritual. Like, I genuinely felt cleansed. Physically wrecked, but spiritually cleansed.”

They all laughed. It was the kind of laughter that only happens when you’re exhausted but happy, and safe with the people who knew you best.

“So,” Maya said after a beat, pushing her empty coffee mug away. “When’s the next one?”

Recea groaned playfully, hiding her face behind her hands. “Girl. Please. Let me recover first.”

“You’re already planning it in your head, aren’t you?” Eli teased gently tossing a piece of hashbrown at Recea. .

Recea paused, then smiled. “Maybe.”

The waitress interrupted the tension as she refilled their coffee. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. 

For a moment, the only sounds were spoons stirring sugar, the crackle of a radio, and Recea’s soft, satisfied sigh.

“Well whenever it is, make sure it’s food there this time”, Maya said as she stuffed her mouth with a pancake. 

The group burst into laughter once again. 

Read the iD Magazine article about the event.