By Tom Kalin, filmmaker (Swoon, Third Known Nest, Savage Grace) – Inside/Out MoMA

I never visited the Warehouse, the Chicago club where legendary Frankie Knuckles was DJ (and where the moniker “House Music” was born), but I was lucky enough to dance all night at the Power Plant, the club he opened there in the early 1980s. Later, during a visit to NYC in the summer of 1983 (before I moved here in 1987), my friends took me out for a delirious pilgrimage to hear the mighty sounds of Larry Levan at Paradise Garage. This former garage at 84 King Street was a place of few words. Dance was the message. Waitresses, postal clerks, trannies, and bankers all moved with an eloquence absent from ordinary life and transformed that dance floor into a music-fueled perpetual state of grace. [Read More]