playbody: The club night bringing connection back to the dancefloor

This article is partly taken from the autumn 2025 issue of Dazed. Buy a copy of the magazine here.

Push through the doors of an East London venue and you’ll find bodies climbing strange objects scattered throughout the room. There are bulbous silicone structures, a carousel repurposed for intimate, spinning conversations, and a human-formed DJ booth. On the ground, a pit of bodies is splashed with sweat and bathed in soft orange light, moving as one with the music. This is playbody, the club-turned-design-lab founded by Thea Arde and Joel Jjio.

Three years ago, the pair sat each other down with the same idea: to create a temporary club that felt radically different from London’s tired nightlife template. Both raised on the dancefloor but restless with what it had become, they wanted to switch the focus from economics to connection. “For financial reasons, more often than not, club spaces have to focus on profitability. There’s a dancefloor, a bar, a smoking area, and things are thought out in terms of maxing out the venue’s capacity,” they explain. “That leaves very little space for thinking about one of the main reasons people go to the club, which is to meet and connect with other humans, and to have fun.”

In many ways, it’s easier to describe playbody as a club ecosystem, feeding back loops of energy between project, performer and clubber. “If everyone participates in the energy in the room, it’s bound to be a good one,” they tell us. “The club is one of the last places that requires you to be there and use your body physically, and we believe there’s real value in honouring and reinventing its ties with the body.”

With that philosophy in mind, the co-founders created a space that treats the club as a testing ground, with design pieces that encourage participants to climb, press, lean into, and dance against objects. “We’ll move things around, bring new designs into the space, learn from our observations of how people play with them, readjust, test, repeat,” they explain. Below, we talk to playbody about just about everything – from collaborators, installations, and the experiments that keep each night in constant motion – but their message is simple: “Follow us, work with us, invite us.”

What is missing from existing club spaces that playbody wants to provide?

playbody: For us, the focus is, how can we encourage people to find new ways of moving, of playing, of connecting with their body, with each other, with the space around them. How can we create an unfamiliar space filled with strange objects, where the etiquette can be rewritten together, with a shared set of values: designed intimacy, intense participation, and personal responsibility. It means that, as opposed to regular club spaces, our space is in constant evolution, a constant testing ground for new ideas. We’ll move things around, we’ll bring new designs into the space, learn from our observations of how people play with them, readjust, test, repeat.

What makes a good club night?

playbody: To us, a good club night relies on three things: the audience, the space and the music curation. The audience is primordial: we believe that everyone has a role to play. Whether it’s the looks you serve or the vibes you bring, the collective experience is shaped by every single member. If everyone participates to the energy in the room, it’s bound to be good. 

You speak about “designed intimacy.” What does that look like in a club context?

playbody: It means using space and design as tools for connecting people, to themselves and to each other. For us in the context of playbody, it goes from designing a piece that needs other bodies to be activated (like the human booth), to closing with an ambient set allowing people to connect and chat instead of turning the lights on and ushering everyone out of the building. 

The 360 booth in the middle of the room means that people face each other and can exchange smiles, flirt… The warm, soft light and the smoke make sweaty bodies glow. The climbable pole near the booth offers a different viewpoint and a chance to connect with the person standing on the opposite one… It means working at creating a space where people feel safe to be sensual and playful.

How does playbody centre queer bodies?

playbody: playbody aims to be a safe space for everyone, but we prioritise our queer community. That means a certain level of precaution, from our no-phone policy to preserve privacy, a social contract that everyone is required to sign before getting a ticket and which outlines our rules (around themes like consent, zero-tolerance against racism, sexism, queer and transphobia), to a dedicated welfare team, to a password-protected ticket link to ensure our community gets in.

What does it mean to create a space where all bodies can feel connected?

playbody: It means creating a space that engages the body in a physical way, while working towards being as safe as possible. Connectedness relies on presence, on groundedness, and the physicality of the body plays a huge role in achieving this. Tapping into each and every one’s inner abilities to relate with the physical world around us, to play, to be curious, to use our senses... There is so much that can be achieved and could benefit from being taken more seriously when it comes to creating a connected experience in the physical world.

How do you curate experiences that encourage people to participate, not just observe?

playbody: We’re very vocal in our communication, that participation is a crucial part of our social contract, for anyone coming to playbody. The pieces are there to help facilitate this; made of different rubbers, they are inviting touch, and the scaffold structures encourage the audience to climb, hang, and explore different levels.

It’s something we communicate on social media, but people are also briefed at the door by our team before they come in. Everyone carries some responsibility in making this a memorable experience. That means, don’t be a tourist. This is not a zoo. You’re either a part of this and you bring something to the table, or this is not the place for you.

How do you hope people leave the night feeling?

playbody: With a full heart. feeling like something very special just happened. feeling gratitude towards the fact that we're able to be so free, so safe, and experience so much joy, when so many suffer around the world. feeling connected, empowered and emboldened by the collective power, to use this extra energy and faith in humanity to take personal action towards making the world a little bit less dark.

How do you invite other creators into the space?

playbody: playbody was thought out with a spirit of collaboration. On the design side of things, we find artists whose work we relate to and think would be a good fit with our concept and aesthetics. A few notable examples are nu-types who designed our bar, badweather, a London-based design collective who we commissioned for the light & smoke installation, or Temporary Pleasure, whose pole dance platform has been a fixture of the party for over a year. We'd also regularly invite a fashion designer to present a club wear capsule. The latest one featured Leo Prothmann, who launched his iconic cage dress design.

Another notable mention, during our V&A East Storehouse takeover, we made the choice to program artists we love and respect from our community, including ceno2, Gloria-Rose, Lo-Low, SEMARA, to name a few. It felt important, especially outside of the club, to highlight and celebrate the people who shape playbody.

What does the future of playbody look like to you?

playbody: We decided early on we didn’t want to expand the club – we believe that to keep feeling magical and safe, it needs to stay small and intimate, and be exclusive to our community. So we're aiming to protect it as it is, and run it as long as we’re able to, or at least until it stops being fun.

But playbody is growing, outside of the venue, outside of the club. The club is our playground, the space to test out our concept and aesthetics, which can be applied to different domains. From curating and producing a 1-day program at the V&A East Storehouse, to designing the interior for a new club concept. We’re taking steps towards a future where we use playbody to explore human connection via radical design in various environments and contexts. 

The question we're asking is: how can we use design to think of new ways for us to connect? to connect to our body? to the space around us? How about at a dinner table? at a bus stop? In a waiting room? There’s an infinity of worlds to play with, and we're here for it.