Imagine being invited to a party, where you’re told:
“Come and enjoy the party, where the music will be loud, the party will go on till the wee hours of
morning, and no neighbors will complain about the noise.”
It is very unlikely to expect someone to say something like this. In fact, you would give a doubting look to the person who says something like this. But I got to witness all of this in Cully.
Cully is a small town in Switzerland, situated on Lake Geneva. Despite a very low population of just 1,750 people, Cully is known for the Cully Jazz Festival, where people from across Switzerland come to enjoy the festival.
I was visiting Switzerland for a workshop, and all the participants decided to visit the Cully Jazz Festival, which had thousands of people. It seemed as if the entire population of Cully had come to this festival.
Obviously, that wasn’t true and the festival had people from many other places.
After checking out a few jazz performances ourselves, we headed to the lake. Right by the lake, there
was a huge, transparent canopy with hundreds of people dancing inside. Surprisingly, we couldn’t hear any music. That’s when; a member of our group noticed the board on top of the canopy that read ‘Silent Party’.
What’s a party without music? Even the religious ceremonies in India have loudspeakers blaring the
latest Hindi blockbuster and here was a board that said Silent Party. It seemed difficult to imagine a concept like that. Curious, we decided to check it out. Before entering, all of us were handed head phones. We put on our head phones and joined the revellers inside. What we saw inside was very exciting! There were hundreds of people dancing, with their heads bobbing with the head phones and yet there was not a single beat of music. To amuse myself, I took off my head phones for some time and tried to soak in the atmosphere. It seemed as if people were in a trance or a telepathic session and they were not realizing what they were doing, while I was watching them move.
A few minutes later, I noticed that I was dancing in a different manner to a beat, whereas a few others from the group were dancing differently. I pointed this out to one of my friends who was not following the beat, but that’s when I was told that he was dancing to a different DJ and I was dancing to another one!
I turned around and looked at the stage and there were three DJs, playing their music live with a different number mentioned on the board behind each DJ: 1, 2 and 3.
That’s when I realized that our head phones had the option of changing from one DJ to other by changing the number that represented a particular DJ. Within the same premises, people could listen and dance to different music and everyone could enjoy their own genre. This made the party even cooler than I had thought.
After that, our entire group would signal a particular number and all of us would switch our head phones to that DJ, so that all of us would be dancing to a similar beat and enjoying each other’s steps.
What was beautiful was that we were all dancing near the lake, under the stars and yet Cully was as
silent as any other night.
I just wished that night that it would be so great to have Silent Parties in India. A country like ours,
where noise pollution is always at its peak, a Silent Party is the need of the hour. Maybe Goa can take the lead and come up with something like this and I would book my tickets for such an event right away!
Readers, if you get an invitation to a Silent Party, then please go for it and enjoy a unique experience.
