You can find them bouncing to hard bass beats in parks or facilitating outdoor dance sessions that move from soul and house to afro and hip hop during summer festivals. In winter, they retreat into various club premises.
Tanzen 3000 is a Berlin-based collective centered around dance culture and conditions that sustain it. The name literally translates to “Dancing 3000”. Because if movement reflects the way people function in society, how will they dance in the year 3000?
“Just shut up and dance”
Tanzen 3000 began in August 2021 with a massive bass speaker, a patch of grass in Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld Park, and a social media announcement. “I wanted to make the event accessible and welcoming to everybody, thus we avoid any particular philosophy or spiritual narrative you often find in ecstatic or hippie dance communities”, explains Thomas Scheele, the key figure behind the Tanzen 3000 group. Together with his friend Ben Pavlidis, a songwriter, producer and ecstatic dance DJ, at first they couldn’t agree on the concept framing. Only the core idea was clear: to create a party space where awareness of body movement prevails. A dancefloor where dancing comes first.
“Eventually we decided to start without fully defining what the initiative was before it happened”, Thomas recalls. Today regular, usually monthly, events gather crowds of more than 100 people to move freely within the music. What sets it apart from ecstatic dance sessions is the absence of predefined rituals or codes. “In ecstatic communities, sometimes you would stand in a circle, holding hands, one palm turned upward, the other downward – giving and receiving energy. You talk about gratitude, happiness, intention. But what if you don’t feel any of those? Let’s just shut up and dance”, Thomas smiles.
Tanzen 3000 presents few guidelines to follow, though. No alcohol, no drugs – participants can come as they are, but shall remain “pretty” sober during the event. “It’s just a couple of hours you spend sharing the dancefloor with others so it’s not that much of an effort to follow those general rules”, says Thomas. T-shirts stay on, so that nobody gets uncomfortable. Phones in the pockets and conversations off the dancefloor – communication happens through movement.
What am I supposed to do here?
Moving intuitively with bodily awareness has become difficult for many. Every Tanzen 3000 session starts with an hour-long musical warmup. “It’s not a dance class”, highlights Notika, a house dancer facilitating some of the introductory workshops “ – more of a dancefloor lesson”, she continues. The point is not to learn steps or choreography, but to find one’s way into confident movement. “People often enter a dancefloor and the concern arises: what do I do next?”, she notes.
Creativity and comfort begin with simple exercises: moving fingers to the rhythm, then gradually letting the motion travel through hands, arms, shoulders and core until the entire body is involved. Once participants settle into the groove, the Tanzen 3000 team may prompt them to make friendly eye contact with a person beside or to pull a “bass face” when music calls for it.
Conventional nightlife environments rarely prioritise customers’ wellbeing. “Clubs deliberately build up sensory overload – music blasting through your eardrums, flashing lights, air thick with sweat – encouraging people to escape through alcohol and drug consumption”, points out Thomas. “That’s their way to make money”, he adds. Yet the problem is systemic rather than bound to individual venues. It’s the economic model that shapes how clubs operate.
Tanzen 3000 sees its activities as a form of advocacy seeking to improve that unhealthy ecosystem. This means not only supporting DJ bookings but also bringing in dancers, allowing them to work beyond studio environments and to receive recognition and pay. In 2025, the collective ran The Better Move, an EU-funded project drawing attention to power dynamics within nightlife and exploring how dancers can be integrated into club programming. Without getting academic, the group organised events combining dance sessions and panels about diverse club cultures. For Thomas, this reflects a broader approach to nightlife governance: working within the dance scene, while also reaching beyond established communities by bringing dance education directly to club goers.
Spaces that build communities
During his student years, Thomas lived in an over 200 m² shared flat. “Some days my room was just a bedroom, the next it transformed to a rave place”, he recalls. In 2009, he started hosting underground parties and immersive theatre events in abandoned urban sites. He directed theme parties structured around fictional narratives, with guests stepping into chosen roles and following given storylines.
But Thomas works neither as a dancer nor a DJ. “It’s more about curating spaces”, he explains. While music doesn’t automatically create community, the context does. Depending on how the space is modelled, different social interactions emerge. This very logic informs Tanzen 3000, which reinforces a community-based rather than a consumer-driven practice, fostering more connection and safety.
Tanzen 3000 is a core team of three, backed by a wider circle of active members. Surprisingly, the biggest challenge is administrative work – ensuring that everybody gets fairly compensated for their contribution. Alongside this come the basic organisational costs, from venue fees when events take place indoors to additional expenses such as website maintenance and banners. Indeed, only in June 2026 could the team afford a second speaker, previously relying on a single sound system they had used since the beginning.
Not only that, but existing legal frameworks don’t fully support initiatives of this kind. Officially, unregistered outdoor parties in Berlin are illegal. “In summer, we are heavily weather-dependent, so it’s impossible to plan in advance and manage to get all the permits on time”, argues Thomas. While playing music on larger speakers in public spaces is technically not allowed, Tanzen 3000 events are tolerated by the park janitor and city administration as they remain low-impact and don’t leave behind waste. After all, the sets played outdoors feel lighter than in typical club acoustics. With some people even showing up with kids, the atmosphere may feel almost picnic-like.
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As early as 2013, Thomas worked with Clubcommission Berlin, a network strengthening club culture in the German capital. He helped develop a licensing model for spontaneous music events in public spaces. To this day, the network runs the Free Open Air Initiative, guiding young collectives through bureaucratic hurdles to carry out their projects. Yet the issue of open air events operating in a legal grey zone remains unresolved.
“I come here because I can’t really afford regular dance classes in this city”, an attendee at a Tanzen 3000 park gathering shares.
It brings back the question of what might dancing look like in the year 3000. Who will have access to dancefloors and under what conditions will individuals be able to move together?
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