The first time Veronica Robertson saw her son fly was at Body Rock.
Not metaphorically. Not in that way parents speak about their children’s achievements with misty-eyed pride. She saw Jaylin Lane, then a teenager trying to make money and find his place in the world, launch himself off the ground at the dance party that has become Austin’s most enduring spiritual institution. In a photograph by Robert Hein that captured the moment, he’s suspended just above the stage while Chaka and Qi – the husband and wife who comprise hip-hop duo Riders Against the Storm – cheer him on, and DJ Chorizo Funk supplies the music.
“The first time I saw my son fly was at Body Rock,” Robertson repeats, as if the wonder of it still catches her off guard years later.
This is what happens at Body Rock ATX: People get free.
For 15 years, on first Fridays and scattered Saturdays, hundreds of Austinites have packed into various venues – from the cramped confines of the original Plush to the Sahara Lounge’s juke joint authenticity to Empire Control Room’s industrial expanse – to experience something that defies the city’s relentless gentrification and segregation. They come for what every single person interviewed calls, unprompted, church. Not church as allegory, but church as ecstatic spiritual experience, as release, as the place where your body tells you you’re in a holy space.
“It’s the best gumbo you’ve ever tasted,” Robertson explains, reaching for the right, palpable culinary analogy. “You can’t have it without the onion. You gotta have that little roux. You gotta have those seafood and meats and vegetables that you can have to marinate in that space. And the way Qi and Chaka and Chorizo put the sauce of it together, and the love and the connection and the spirituality – this is more than just tapping your feet in a space.”
When Bodies Rock
At the dance party’s June edition, a Prince tribute at Parish, purple sequins caught the light like prayers. At July’s Stevie Wonder/Outkast-blended “Songs in the Key of Stankonia” tribute at Sahara Lounge, the crowd moved as one organism to the slowed-down snap-rap of D4L’s “Laffy Taffy,” bleeding into Lil Jon’s “Lovers and Friends,” and eventually into Outkast’s “Roses.” These were disparate sets of people who would likely never converge otherwise: straight Black men existing peacefully alongside white nonbinary identities, criminal defense attorneys next to jewelry artists, state workers beside landscape contractors. They danced with no judgment – no need to know each other’s professions, pockets, or politics.
“There’s people that I’ve seen for years and I still don’t know their names,” says Monique Hatch, who’s been attending for 11 years. “I call them my Body Rock friends.”
People waited in line to get into Jonathan “Chaka” Mahone and Ghislaine “Qi Dada” Jean’s house parties in Providence, where they lived before moving to Austin in 2009. Jean would conduct a creative or intellectual salon in one room, while Mahone fried chicken in the kitchen.
“People would give us feedback like, ‘When are you going to do the next one?’” Mahone recalls.
Body Rock began in 2010, when Eddie “Chorizo Funk” Campos partnered with the couple to bring that energy to a public space. What emerged from that collision was unprecedented in Austin’s racialized landscape.
“This was the hypersegregated Austin,” Jean emphasizes. “I didn’t know a world that wasn’t intersectional. I didn’t know segregation the way that I was experiencing it here in the South.”
Body Rock became the answer – not through intention but through ordination. Both Mahone and Jean are initiated in West African spiritual practice, bringing what they call a “sacred order” to the proceedings. “We’re actually spiritually ordained – spiritually initiated, I should say,” Jean explains. “So there is a sacred order to what we’re doing, even if people don’t see or understand what that is.”
Geographies of Freedom
Maybe 30 people showed up to the first party at Plush, remembers Roger Reeves, a poet, writer, and UT professor. But something happened as it moved to Loft 718, then Sahara Lounge, and beyond. Something that would reshape the emotional geographies of many unlikely souls for the next 15 years.
“Body Rock is a cultural experience that will change you from the person that you came in [as],” says Joe Evans, who discovered the event through the popular events server Do512 in 2018.
The changes manifest differently. For Hatch, who arrived covered up in a hot wig and business casual blazer 11 years ago, it meant questioning why she’d placed such boundaries on herself. “I saw everyone being so free,” she recalls. “I just remember people’s limbs moving easily.” She realized she was doing the bullying to herself that others had done to her as a plus-sized, dark-skinned child. She discovered, she remembers, “There’s no one here watching me.”
Juan Cortez, now a frequent Body Rock guest DJ, articulates what makes the space unique: “Any other establishment just feels like a venue. It’s just a venue. Body Rock can go anywhere.” He’s right: Throughout all of its location changes, the party has maintained its essential character. Its eventual transition to Sahara was because they were packing Loft 718, which came after Plush, “wall to wall,” Mahone says. The Webberville venue, known for its weekly Africa Night buffet and musical showcase, acts as something of a Body Rock home base, though other spots fit the bill depending on the tribute. “It’s a traveling revival tent,” Cortez offers, and the comparison sticks.
The safety that Hatch felt at her first party wasn’t accidental. Jean and Mahone actively conduct the space, calling out any behavior that threatens the container they’ve created. “We will stop the party and be like, ‘No, we don’t play that shit,’” Jean states flatly. “This is our ceremony and you don’t come into our space and mess around. This is not a game.”
“We never had a fight there,” Mahone adds. “Either they get swept up into the energy or they leave. That’s it.”
Love & Football
Lily Shepard Carter moved from Las Vegas to South Austin in 2015, only to find that much of the city’s Black population had migrated north to Pflugerville. Her best friend, Reyna, insisted she come to Body Rock, and suggested she dress comfortably despite her Vegas-trained instinct to dress up for nightlife. She wore jean shorts, tennis shoes, a white tank top, and a Yankees fitted hat.
“I just danced,” she remembers. “I sweated out everything.”
At some point during one of those early nights at Empire, a man started dancing beside her. Not on her, but beside her, catching the same frequency she was riding. They shared a moment, quick and unassuming, before the night swept them in different directions.
“It wasn’t like we danced the whole night away together,” Lily clarifies. Kenavon Carter had just separated from his wife of 20 years. He wasn’t looking for anything.
“I was divorced, right?” he explains. “And 20 years. And I was like, ‘I’m not ever getting married. I’m not looking. I don’t want to.’”
But Body Rock had other plans. They became Body Rock friends first, meeting monthly at the event, then occasionally grabbing food or watching football outside, away from the action. This went on for years – Lily dated other people, and both of them maintained a friendship that revolved around their church attendance.
It was at another Prince tribute where things shifted. Lily wore a purple sequined beret. They went outside to the food truck. “We talked about, like, we kinda like each other more than friends and what are we gonna do with that?” Lily recalls.
Kenavon professed his love for Lily after a few dates – right after another dance. “Directly after a Body Rock, in that midst of feeling the spirit of love and energy and just great vibes,” he remembers.
Would they have met otherwise? “No,” Lily says, without hesitation. “We were not hanging out at the same places and doing the same things for sure.”
Kenavon agrees: “Being in Body Rock, being with the spirit and the energy, man. It just made everything possible and open and it just wasn’t a lot of weight on everything.”
The Mechanics of Miracles
Great alignment was necessary for this to take off.
James Taylor gave Body Rock its first home at Plush in 2010. “Because the economics were different, it was okay to fail,” he reflects from Minneapolis. “We could afford it.”
When Body Rock started, if 30 people showed up on a Wednesday, paying nothing at the door, splitting 20% of the bar three ways might mean each founder went home with $20.
“It was the B-boys that always showed up,” Mahone says. And then everyone showed up.
The music also has to work.
Campos, the central third element in Body Rock’s holy trinity, describes his role with characteristic precision: “I have to be thinking steps ahead of the party all the time. So even though I can’t always fully relax and just let my hair down and partake in all those things that people love in the moment, it feels great. It’s a great feeling to be orchestrating that.”
The orchestration requires reading the room with supernatural meticulousness. For the Stevie Wonder/Outkast tribute, Campos explains: “You can’t be too rigid. I could have my mindset beforehand of like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna play this and I’m gonna play that, and then I’m gonna transition to this other song.’ But it also just depends on who’s actually on the dance floor at that moment.”
Then, there is the alchemy.
“We’re making the world together, right?” asks Reeves. “The dancers, the people enjoying, the people just milling about grabbing a drink. All of us are making this world. And making this possibility of maybe what the future could be.
“I think artmaking is a futuristic endeavor always, if it’s being done right.”
Robertson knows exactly what would disappear if Body Rock ended tomorrow, if the future ended: “It would feel like my grandmother’s house got burned down. That sense that you could just never go back home.”
The loss would ripple beyond the personal. “I think what would be missing for the city is an opportunity to see pure humanity,” Hatch argues. “You get to see people enjoying themselves, expressing their bodies and living how they want to, even if it’s just for a moment.”
In a city that has systematically erased its Black and Brown cultural legacies, Body Rock persists as what local event producer Scott “Papa Chop” Romero calls “one of the top two longest-running institutions, as far as monthlies, in Austin, [ever].” It was here during an Obama presidency, before Eric Tang’s damning analysis of Black population loss, and continues into a second, non-consecutive Trump presidency already threatening the country’s future. Though it misses a month here and there (September’s Beyoncé birthday tribute has been pushed to October), it has outlasted the venues that housed it, the waves of tech money that transformed the city, the world-altering pandemic that shuttered everything else. And yet, the big tent remains, inclusive, prepared, and ready to take all who are willing to lay their egos and personas aside, or at least in the parking lot. It is the exact opposite of what the city has become.
“Austin’s like this one big venue and you gotta have a VIP pass to get into everything,” Hatch observes. “No one’s dancing. Everybody’s just standing around looking at each other, posing.”
The Moment of Flight
In that 2016 photo, Jaylin Lane hovers, as his mother, Veronica Robertson, marvels.
“I had never been in a space where my urge to dance and to let go and to be free was so high and so accepted and ready,” Lane reflects. “It’s like you plug into an electrical outlet – it’s just instant power, connection, release.
“You can’t do that being weighed down by life.”
That event proved a turning point for Lane. The next year, he featured in the video for Riders Against the Storm’s Mobley-produced single “Mali,” transforming from a scarred African hostage to a man with a clear back. He had pieced his life back together after a quarterlife crisis, briefly becoming a dancer and instructor. He was featured in videos for Houston rapper Tobe Nwigwe and Austin electronic duo MISSIO. For a short time, he was a performer for Ranch Hands Cowboylesque, a cowboy comedy burlesque show. He used a $200 grant he received from DAWA, the nonprofit Mahone launched to support local artists of color, combined with his last paycheck from a day job, to launch his own landscaping company, Straight Edge Landscaping.
This is the miracle of Body Rock: not that people learn to dance, but that they remember they can fly.
Tabernacle
“It’s church,” everyone says, and they mean it literally. The kind of church where divinity shows up in a DJ’s perfect transition, where the holy ghost looks like a Soul Train line, where resurrection happens quarterly, at least, without fail.
The next Body Rock approaches like a promise. Somewhere in Austin, someone is counting the days until they can go home again, until they can put down what they’ve been carrying, until they can remember what it feels like to be without weight. They’ll pay their $10 – a cover the trio has fought to keep from rising – and they’ll enter a space that shouldn’t exist in this city anymore but does, through will and spirit and the stubborn insistence that some things are too sacred to die.
When the music starts and Chaka and Qi take the mic, Chorizo will drop into that first transition, and bodies will become one, rocking. And somewhere in that crowd, someone will discover, for the first time or the hundredth, that they were born with wings.
They will get free.
Body Rock returns to Sahara Lounge October 3 with a Beyoncé tribute.
This article appears in August 29 • 2025.
