Aaron Peters grew up on stories about his late grandfather, who casually played keyboards in a few bands and worked house parties “sometimes until the early hours of the morning” That picture, a band holding a room while people move, sits under Quarterly Levitation, the new seasonal dance series Peters launches at Colorbox Studios this Sunday, 25 October.
Peters has always moved between both worlds. Live music came first and runs in his family: “Simply put it’s my first love,” he says. Before The Other he managed the Cape Town instrumental post-rock/indie band Bateleur, then worked at the artist-management agency Black Major. Dancing pulled him towards DJs and club spaces, but the two have always run together. At Search Festival, where he was music director, he’s long balanced live acts with DJs. “Bringing different scenes and crowds together is something I’ve always tried to do,” he says. He co-founded The Other, which ran a record shop and community radio station, ran the leftfield party SWIM, and DJs as Air On, one of the night’s residents. Quarterly Levitation puts both sides equally in the same room.
The pitch is simple and, in Cape Town, rare. Most dance parties here run on selectors. This one keeps the beauty of our city’s world-class selectors and adds a live band, The Levitation House Band, a group led by Zwide Ndwandwe, the former Kujenga bassist now working solo (as Zwide Serves Bass) and one of the heavier names in local music, the jazz scene especially. Peters calls him “an exceptional musician, one of the best around”, and had been circling a collaboration for a while: “this felt like the right project to jump into.” “I love the idea of a band shaping the dance floor live, in the moment. There’s an energy to a live band that just hits differently,” Peters says. “The idea isn’t especially radical, but it’s something that doesn’t happen often enough: blurring the lines between a gig and a party.”
The selectors are no afterthought. Peters plays as Air On alongside his co-organiser Paul Waxon, of Kwaitour and the much-missed Wax On, with Candice Horn, who co-founded The Commons in Muizenberg and DJs as Candyflip, taking the first guest slot. He’s unembarrassed about loving that side as much as the live one: “I love both worlds.” Waxon he rates for “a pure love of music and a breadth of taste that keeps surprising and energising me”.
Committed to the groove
Getting a band to move a dancefloor is its own craft, and Ndwandwe has done the work before. At venues like Cabo Beach he’s built setlists that, in his words, “felt like a DJ set”, watching flow, tempo and energy to keep people on their feet. What changes, he says, is the pulse, the thing he has to hold and get the band to hold with him: “How do I keep committed to the groove and how do I make the band stay committed to that as well?”
The set is arranged, but not locked. “Because we’re also musicians, there will be some kind of space for that little bit of play and creative improvisation,” Ndwandwe says. A band, like a DJ, has to read the room and find “what is working or what could work in real time”. The low end is his anchor. Hearing bass live, he reckons, adds “a little bit more of electricity […] Someone’s kind of pulling those grooves in real time in front of you”.
A Sunday thing
The night runs 16:00 to 23:30, which is a choice, not a compromise. Peters rates Cape Town’s house and techno scenes but thinks they’ve cornered the dancefloor. “Those spaces can feel quite intimidating if you’re not into club culture,” he says, “And I think it’s important to offer more ways to enjoy a dance floor.” Sundays still feel wide open in the city. He points to We House Sundays at the same venue, to Cold Turkey’s Sunday sessions in his own formative years, and to Glasgow’s Sub Club. Doors open early enough that “you can have your Sunday lunch and then come through for a dance”.
Welcome is a word Peters keeps returning to, and he’s wary of it sounding like branding. “It comes down to care,” he says. In practice that means keeping some affordable tickets in the mix, briefing door and security staff to treat people with respect, working with venue owners who share the same values, and acting on feedback when something’s off. “It’s not a distinct strategy or science, it’s about being genuinely compassionate.”
Fruit, flowers and a full room
One of many prominent reference points is David Mancuso’s Loft parties in New York, which Peters says have shaped much of what he does: open with the music, serious about care, fruit and food to keep dancers going. Hence the seasonal fruit platters, and flower displays from volumetwospace. PUPIL, a VJ Peters rates as one of the city’s legends, builds the lighting. Hundred Percent handle the food. A11 run the sound on a Martin Audio rig.
For Ndwandwe the stakes run past atmosphere. He talks about the dancefloor as somewhere to “free the body”, and about pulling it back from “the social media camera out kind of paradigm” he thinks we’re stuck in. The smartphone, as he sees it, has got between people and the plain act of dancing. He is not alone in the worry. Jack White has run phone-free shows for years, locking devices in Yondr pouches so crowds look up from their gadgets; Phoebe Bridgers ran a no-phones tour this year, betting fans would rather be in the room than behind a screen. Those are bans at the door. Quarterly Levitation is chasing the same instinct from the other side, building a room and a live band worth putting the phone down for in the first place.
That is the real test on the 25th. A Sunday-afternoon dance built around a band and selectors is a bet that enough people still want to be in a room together, close enough to watch someone pull the bassline by hand.
Peters spaces the series across the seasons so each edition can “feel like an occasion, with its own character”. Spring goes first. If it works, Quarterly Levitation won’t have reinvented the party. It will have made the case that a band and a dancefloor still belong in the same room.
