[WATCH] Armin van Buuren Maps the Psychology of the Dancefloor Across a Five Hour Set at UNVRS

Armin van Buuren has spent 25 years at the center of A State of Trance, and his newest film points the camera away from himself. The 10 minute mini documentary was filmed during his A State of Trance residency at UNVRS in Ibiza. It follows the crowd through one of his five-hour sets, while psychotherapist Rachel Giddings breaks the night into five stages, one for each hour.

“This documentary is very special to us because it is about you: the person on the dancefloor”.

The residency is his first official run at UNVRS: five consecutive Mondays from September 7 to October 5, each with a five-hour set, marking 25 years since A State of Trance launched as a radio show in 2001. Every night also includes a vinyl only hour.

A framework built on ritual theory, not a lab study

Giddings is a BACP accredited psychotherapist who works with artists and music companies, and in the film she introduces herself as “a psychotherapist, but I’m also a raver.” Her five stages are not an established psychological model, and nothing was measured on the UNVRS floor. The description says as much. The framework draws on anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, sociologist Émile Durkheim, anthropologist Victor Turner, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and research on music and social bonding by Robin Dunbar and colleagues, and “its application to the experience of a live set is the interpretation of Rachel Giddings.”

The backbone is van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage from 1909, which describes life transitions in three phases: separation from ordinary life, an in between period he called liminal, and incorporation back into society. Turner expanded that middle phase in 1969 and named the bond people form inside it communitas. Giddings lays that arc over a night in the club. Some of her stages line up with real research on crowds and music. Others are a therapist’s reading of the room.

1. Arrival (1am)

Giddings frames the first hour as van Gennep’s separation: butterflies at the door, “leaving our old identities behind,” and having “not yet become the person we’re going to leave as.” One fan in the film puts it more plainly: “The first time I stepped into the main stage, my soul left my body. Like being in Disneyland for adults.”

This one is theory. Van Gennep was writing about births, initiations, weddings and funerals, and nobody has tested his phases on people walking into a superclub.

2. Entrainment (2am)

Once the room stops feeling new, Giddings says, “we begin to sync our heart rate, our breath, our movement to the room and to one pulse.” Her summary: “Instead of being me and you, we become us.”

Research backs part of that. In a 2015 study in Biology Letters, Bronwyn Tarr, Dunbar and colleagues found that dancing in sync and dancing with effort each raised people’s pain thresholds, a stand in for endorphin release, and made them feel closer to the group. A 2021 study in Scientific Reports tracked 98 audience members across three live concerts and found their heart rate, breathing and skin responses rising and falling together, most strongly at transitions and repeated phrases in the music. Those concerts were a string quintet, not a trance set, and bodies responding in step is not a room sharing one heartbeat. The direction of her claim holds up. The literal version goes further than the data.

3. Collective Effervescence (3am)

The third hour depends on the room getting everything right: sound, visuals, temperature. When it does, Giddings says, “we almost go quiet in our brains. We switch off and then we start to merge.” She names it directly: “That is the term collective effervescence.”

Durkheim coined the phrase in 1912 to describe the charged energy of religious gatherings. It is a sociological idea, not a measured state. The switching off she describes overlaps with Csikszentmihalyi’s flow, which includes a loss of self consciousness among its markers. The point about the environment has some of the best evidence in the film. At a 2022 McMaster University LIVELab show by electronic duo Orphx, researchers switched very low frequency bass on and off below what the crowd could hear, and people danced about 12% more when it was on. A 2021 Frontiers in Psychology study of 481 ravers, led by Martha Newson, found that when people felt awe at a rave, it was tied to a sense of personal transformation and stronger bonds with other ravers.

4. The Release (4am)

Hour four hands control to the DJ. “We start to be led by Armin,” Giddings says. He “holds us” through the peak, “and then he releases us.”

This is the most interpretive of the five. It echoes Turner’s communitas, though the film doesn’t name him here, and no study has looked at a DJ holding and releasing a crowd. Anyone who has waited out a long trance breakdown will know the feeling she means. Her closing line on this hour, “It is the most powerful thing a human being can experience in their life,” is her claim, not the research’s.

5. Reintegration (5am)

The last hour is van Gennep’s return. Time has warped, Giddings says, and people start realizing they are about to go back to their lives “carrying something beautiful away.” In her words, “Part of the reintegration is to encode the experience.” People met in that final hour are stored as significant, which is why a stranger “can become family in an instant.” Then: “And that is why we keep coming back.”

Two pieces of this are well established. Losing track of time is one of Csikszentmihalyi’s markers of flow, and emotionally charged experiences are stored more strongly in memory, a process neuroscientist James McGaugh tied to the amygdala in a 2004 review. The jump from there to strangers becoming family is Giddings’ own, though Newson’s rave study, which linked those experiences to ravers giving up something of their own for each other in an economic game, is the closest support.

Armin on why the floor matters to him

Between the stages, Giddings interviews Armin, and his answers explain why he made the film. “When I started listening to dance music when I was 15, 16, I felt like I was really weird for liking that kind of music,” he says. “I remember feeling super lonely in the early days of my career when people just weren’t understanding what I was playing or making.” Finding school friends who loved dance music and going to shows with them “made me feel like I belonged and I wasn’t crazy for liking this music.”

Giddings brings up a line he once said 10 years into his career: “I know my family will always be here. But will my fans?” His fans answered that they would still be there in 20 years. “That gets me emotional actually,” he says. He ends the film on it: “I make music for myself, but if nobody listens, what’s the point? So, yeah, it gives my life purpose and I’m eternally grateful for that.”

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The residency runs through October 5, with Face to Face sets alongside ARGY on September 21 and Funk Tribu on September 28 before Armin closes it on his own. Tickets are available through UNVRS.