For Gen Z, nightlife has less to do with bouncers, booze and big lineups

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Huddled under the Gardiner Expressway in a recent spring storm, international dance star Michelle “Ky” Hanitijo pointed back at the stage behind us. “I started my street dance journey literally on that wooden platform over there,” she said.

The 27-year-old has more than a million followers for her dance videos across multiple international platforms. Her troupe Funkyverse won the national hip hop dance competition in Montreal in March and is headed to the world finals in Phoenix in August.

Born in Singapore, Hanitijo lived in Shanghai as a child and now works in Toronto. I first saw her dancing toward the end of the Midnight Dragon edition of New Ho Queen, a queer Asian club night named for the iconic late night Chinese restaurant on Spadina in Toronto, New Ho King. Strobes swooped across the crowd of happy twentysomethings – many in extravagant costumes, more in Lululemon hip bags. But all the professional photographers snapping pictures for social media made it hard to get lost in the performances, and no-one in the crowd seemed to be pushing the beat with abandon.

Then Hanitijo stepped on stage – without fanfare, smiling with a look of pure joy out over the crowd. She hit each ticktocking beat with a precise swish or flick, co-opting the music for her story. I realized that this was the thrill I missed from my clubbing days – the portrait of a thousand characters you could get by watching them dance. This insight was half the intoxication of the evenings. (The other half was vodka cranberry.)

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Hanitijo’s story encapsulates differences in dance spaces between generations. The mix of invitation-only online and offline connection that spurs Gen Z dance communities didn’t exist in my clubbing days.

Whereas my cohort of older millennials found a sense of community out at clubs in what sociologist Sebastien Tutenges describes as intoxicated “effervescent revelry,” youthful togetherness is now often found online more than in person – if it’s found at all. Statisticians will tell you that twentysomethings today have lost millennials’ interest in drinking, sex and even friends. Loneliness used to be seen as a geriatric risk, but now, according to a global Gallup and Meta poll from 2023, those aged 19-29 are the loneliest generation, with 57 per cent reporting feeling alone – the same percentage of those aged over 65 who reported never feeling lonely at all.

Still, by now we’ve heard this story about what Gen Z has lost compared with older people. I wanted to understand how all these changes also reveal what they’ve gained. After all, even as countless nightclubs closed, TikTok’s viral dances gathered massive audiences to the platform.

I started tracking Hanitijo down online but struggled to make it through spam filters and messaging request blocks. Finally, I decided to go to a Deep in Vogue workshop run by Toronto Kiki Ballroom Alliance at Fort York that she’d reposted. But when I arrived at the Fort York visitor centre that rainy March evening, my chances wasted away as I tried all the doors, only to find each one locked as a private Instagram account.

Then I saw some young people in bright thrifted clothes and novel hair colours slipping into the historic part of the Fort. Inside the low-slung barracks with an old wooden floor, the workshop guests gathered, stretched, changed their shoes, and laughed and chatted with Hanitijo – because there she was.

Over the next two hours, she led us through the encyclopedia of moves she channels in her voguing sessions, a collage drawn from breakdancing, animation, hieroglyphics, martial arts, Kung Fu action movies and seventies fashion photography. “Movement is a big part of us celebrating each other,” she said to me after the workshop as we chatted under the Gardiner. She and her friends are focused on bringing a more exuberant and experimental focus on dance in contrast to the materialism of club culture, with its expensive clothes and drinks. “So, it’s not just people just jumping around and just getting drunk, getting wasted.”

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The early aughts landscape of the club, with its dependable weekly nights and enormous bouncer stopping outsiders at the door, has been replaced by the restrictions of online communities, where you have to be welcomed to know what’s going on. Hanitijo describes this containment as an “intentional gatekeeping” that permits greater safety for her queer community. Perhaps older millennials who complain that there’s nowhere to dance are just not part of the digital networks that would tell them.

Hanitijo linked an explosion of digital connection and dance sharing to the pandemic lockdowns, including online workshops but also the posts of @iamsugarchampagne, who started releasing vintage clips from the seventies and eighties during COVID-19 and hasn’t stopped. This self-described “Ballroom Archivist” is sharing historic vibes with a new and zero-proof generation of dancers who, like Hanitijo, are watching with more intention than abandon.

Hanitijo describes finding fresh moves in dance content online and then, in her words, “affirming and confirming” the power of these new gestures by trying them out while dancing with her in-real-life friends and community. Listening to Hanitijo I was beginning to understand that, either in person, online or both, you’ll never dance alone.

Forty minutes into our dark and rainy chat I felt a growing sense of satisfaction. I could stop panicking about the lapsing state of the disco and the loneliness of kids these days. When I’d gone looking for Hanitijo online, with my weak Instagram skills and middle-aged reliance on institutions – the large club to go to each night – I couldn’t find her. Yet in person Hanitijo had opened the door to an omnipresent club culture that moves seamlessly from TikTok to the dance floor. With this collective digital effervescence on tap, who needs vodka cranberry?