SCRANTON, Pa. — It will look like a party on Friday night in Scranton, but it won't sound like one unless you're wearing a special set of headphones.
"It's a dance party where you're curating your own experience. We provide the headset. There'll be three channels, with totally different playlists playing simultaneously," said Conor Kelly O'Brien, co-founder and executive director of the Scranton Fringe Festival.
It's called a "Silent Disco," and it's coming to the Electric City as part of an annual arts festival that takes place throughout the downtown area.
"The Scranton Fringe Festival is a 10-day performing arts celebration. We just completed our first weekend. We had wonderful crowds, and we have another great lineup of music, theater, dance, and a silent disco."
Fringe festivals happen all across the country and world. Conor Kelly O'Brien has attended many of them. He brought the concept to Scranton back in 2015 and added a "silent disco" to the agenda in 2019.
"We were seeing silent disco programming being a really great opportunity to sort of end the night, bring people together something new unique which is very the fringe and incidentally enough one of the top providers of this technology is based right here in Northeast Pennsylvania and experience, so it was a perfect partnership," O'Brien said.
Festival organizers have found plenty of uses for the technology, including for a COVID-friendly theater last year, where the performers were behind storefront windows.
Outside of the festival, they've hosted silent discos at elementary schools and senior centers.
"You get to be in the same space, you get to be dancing, but you get to be creating your own experience. So if something on, let's say, channel blue isn't your taste, then you still have two other options you can jump over to."
You can dance the night away Friday at 9:30 at the Scranton Cultural Center.
Plus, there are tons of events going on throughout the week as part of the Fringe Festival.