No Lights No Lycra

Dark, sweaty, and hot was how I would describe my Tuesday night, and no I didn’t spend it with my latest boyfriend. Instead, I spent it dancing with strangers.

Every week a group of like minded Canberrans get together in order to dance and have fun with the lights off.

No Lights No Lycra offers an alternative to dancing in a nightclub says Lucy Nelson one of two people who run the Canberra group.

“It’s for people who love to dance but don’t necessarily want to go to a nightclub or dance classes, they feel self conscious, there’s gender politics and people look at you. So you can just dance in your trackie-daks and be comfortable and have fun with no body watching you.”

“And dance to the music that you wanna hear on a night out, like a mix of old stuff and new stuff, not the Top 40 or what they normally play in a nightclub. Not that there’s anything wrong with the Top 40,” continued Lisa Sampson the other half of the duo.

It is certainly nothing like a Nightclub, for a start it’s cheaper and no one was dancing to impress, just dancing for themselves. You also get a far better workout than you would at a gym and the time just flies by. Within no time everyone had sweat dripping of them and the heat that had built up in the room had caused condensation to form on the walls.

After starting in Melbourne, NLNL has now spread around the world, with nights held in London, Berlin, and Sydney and their popularity is growing.

“We’re almost coming up to our first birthday and we’ve been really lucky with people getting on board in Canberra,” says Sampson, listing BMA and the Canberra Times as two of their biggest supporters.

“We’ve also done a couple of events at the You Are Here festival.”

Those events included one for kids, something which Nelson would like to do more of.

“We’d like to start with some more different, unique events. Doing more one off events would be fun,” she said.

No Light No Lycra is held every Tuesday night at Corroboree Park Ainslie, starting at 7.45pm and running until 9.15 pm with an entry fee of $5.