British Asian daytime raves

With the festive season under way, family gatherings taking place across the capital, and thoughts of 2023 celebrations beginning to take shape, activities at Half Moon are calming down for a couple of weeks. This is a much-needed pause, as it’s been a hugely busy time for Half Moon.

Throughout November we undertook a nine-venue UK tour of Daytime Deewane, a new show that was inspired by the daytime raves of 1990s British Asian culture. The production explored the beauty and struggle of living with a multi-cultural identity and invited audiences to step into an immersive night club and be a part of the action.

Featuring a DJ mix merging soundscapes, dance music and spoken word, the show has been hugely popular with teenage and adult audiences alike. We’ve even had some audience members who used to come to daytime raves themselves!

Daytime raves were a cultural phenomenon of the 80s and 90s. Taking place across the UK from London to Bradford, daytime parties were avenues for young people of South Asian descent to dance, drink or even hook up — set to the soundtrack of their own music and on their own terms.

Daytime Deewane was the first piece of theatre for young audiences by Azan Ahmed. The story came about because he wanted to explore what radical joy looked like through a British Asian perspective. Azan kept coming back to the stories that his dad told him about the daytime raves, when British Asians carved out what it meant to be British and Asian.

“Daytime Deewane is about a piece of British history which is often neglected,” Ahmed told us. “The daytime raves were a space for pure Brown joy and I wanted to document that through theatre. The play shows that Brown people can shimmy, stomp and slide into genres that they defined. I want young people to realize that their parents might have been cool back in the day. This is a story that could be your uncles, your dads or your aunties and will show what it means to be British Asian.”

Starting life as a spoken word monologue in our 2021 artist development programme, Narratives of Empathy and Resilience, Daytime Deewane has evolved into an exhilarating new immersive show for teenagers described by Everything Theatre as “Unmissable! An exceptional, joyously buzzing piece of immersive gig theatre that sensitively articulates complex themes and deep social issues”.

Stephen Beeny is the Communication Manager at Half Moon.