Moshing as a Choreography of Care

A choreography of care can be associated to intentional movements of attentiveness and concern, gestures of outreach performing supportive actions for physical comfort and rejuvenation. Within a shared collective space, care can be considered a regard for others that both reaches out and invites the possibility of connection. In contrast, the performance of moshing is typically an experience of “pushing, shoving, pummelling and bouncing off one another” (Perkins, 2013) in response to heavy metal, punk or rave music. However, “if you step back and watch a mosh unravel, you will notice that it’s a ritualised form of social cooperation” (Tabone, 2020).

The choreography of care in this chapter refers to rituals of cooperation demonstrated within moshing as a community of care practice. Often, we associate care with soothing physical gestures rather than one’s executed at high speed and as a swarm of volatile bodies. And yet moshing generates a sense of belonging that is uniquely punk and heavy metal with thrashing bodies moving in synchronicity to extreme music that unites in its exhilarating feeling of camaraderie. “For many heavy metal fans, the mosh pit is considered a safe, self-contained and welcoming space that evokes a strong sense of belonging” (Kennelty, 2015).

The dance production MOSH, produced for the Dublin Fringe Festival 2023 by dance artist Rachel Ní Bhraonáin, offered audiences an engagement with care depicted through a culture of music and dance surging into vehement physical manifestations (Figure 1). This frenzy of entanglement, kinaesthetic release and energetic exchange, executed care as a form of exertion and risk (Demolder, 2023). As an improvised choreography of consensual risk taking, moshing can be associated with corporeal potentials, acts of self-creation and new possibilities of what a body can do (Lyng, 2005). It is a navigation of chaos and uncertain circumstances that transports participants “out of the mundane and into sensual immediacy” composing a generative ethos of subjectivity out of bounds (Lyng, 2005, p. 24).