To Be or Not to Be: Space, Ibiza

Space may not be the friendliest club in Ibiza, but when it comes to sound production and laser light shows they’ve got it bang-on.

SO it was a shame to see La Discoteca – usually lit up like a Christmas tree all awash with rays of intense diagonal colour and vivid video screens – deathly quiet on Friday night and decidedly low key on the illumination front. That’s not to say we were dancing in darkness, but it was sans the dramatic, pioneering visual experience regular punters have come to expect.

Friday’s Be @ Space party is a somewhat obscure concept. So much so that I’m not even really sure what that concept is. While the club’s other nights are loosely modelled on themes a little less murky (Come Together unites a hybrid of diverse tastes, Kehakuma is a Japanese night for, err…Germans, We Love is the prolonged Sunday session symbolised by giant smiley faces, The Revolution is one big Carl Cox ego trip, and Monday Calling – well, no one really cares as they’re either at Circo Loco or Cocoon), Be seems less inspired, its theme almost as ambiguous as its title: Be what? Be cool? Hip to be square? To be or not to be? That most certainly is the question.

One surely wasn’t any more enlightened by the dancers’ costumes: elaborate Georgian wigs and shimmering cloaks, oversized hats, feathers, parasols, giant harps with fluorescent coloured strings – a creative, visual spectacle to the sounds of pure tech house and underground beats.

A trapeze artist hung from a hoop suspended from the ceiling in the centre of the terraza, while a crowned performer on stilts posed inside a picture frame. It was all sort of surreal, a bit Alice and Wonderland, but with a lot less effort made on the interiors compared to Kehakuma or Come Together. It was fascinating to watch all the same, when you weren’t engrossed in the one-man show that was Wally Lopez bouncing about behind the decks, all smiles, techno silliness and thick-rimmed glasses. While in the next room Chris Liebing looked like a man possessed, caught up in the ‘oomf oomf oomf’ of his headbanging house.

I have to admit I’m lost on this one. According to the Space website Be is a ‘mythical night all about ‘Kings and Queens and their entourage’ supposedly set in a royal court where ‘crown jewels are lost in hidden corridors, curvy stairwells and secret passageways’. I’m not convinced. Even the lighting guys didn’t make the effort. Perhaps the night should be re-titled ‘Couldn’t Be Bothered’.

First published on I Voice, Ibiza, August 2010.
© Abbey Stirling