Spun Out - DJ Documentary

Spun Out

An Offbeat Insight into the World of the DJ and the UK Dance scene.

This work examines the role of the DJ as a contemporary urban Shaman, rather than the commonly portrayed media image of an ego-inflated superstar.

In an ever-complex contemporary society, functioning with the primal vitality of a musician, entertainer and tribal initiator, the DJ fills those voids left by individual and collective disaffection and marginalisation.

The DJ has the innate ability, and opportunity, to guide us through an entitled rite of passage, a custom long-lost in Western culture.

This film is a visual and musical narration with its focus on the seminal role that the DJ has within modern civilization.

Economics and the mass market are considerations. Dance culture forces significant changes within commercial, fashion and creative trends, with the DJ an inspiring impulse behind young design.

The DJ is a re-animator of deep primal needs, exposing with pulses and rhythms the communal heartbeat of those that abandon the prohibitive conventions of daily life, and welcome the spirit of dance, music and fellowship.

In all culture dance is a fundamental medium of sharing and expression, with the DJ having the entitlement to incite movement in even the most passive and sedentary. By the transmutation of contemporary social dance into community, culture is born.

This film probes a practice that has the capacity to initiate movement on a collective scale, to stimulate political mass and inspire new social consciousness.

The DJ is a leader in the transient community of the moment, uniting a largely anonymous collective through rhythm, dance and groove, navigating this group by the positive validation of shared values and beliefs.

In modern cosmopolitan society young people perpetually search for community ritual and myth from a world otherwise holding little spiritual meaning. Consequently there is willingness to enter into collective participation and lucid, honest connection with peers similarly disillusioned by the self-absorbed cult of the individual.

A penetrating analysis of research that incorporates facets of ethnomusicology and dance, this film is artistically reconstructed to illustrate the work-life, practice and socio-political potential of the DJ within Western culture.