A group of people board a bus. They don’t know where they’re going. They don’t know who some of their fellow travelers are. They only know they’re going to have some fun.
They’re being taken to a secret party organized by Limb, a group of 15 like-minded young people that formed around a month ago and decided to arrange a series of nine secret parties.
The first party was held on Aug. 19 in Vyshhorod, 20 kilometers north of Kyiv. It attracted around 100 adventurous electronic music fans.
The main idea was to give people a new experience of partying in unusual places instead of going to familiar bars and clubs, Limb’s members said.
They want their visitors to enjoy the fun atmosphere and not concentrate on anything else.
“Limb is a condition, when people dive into the atmosphere and lose their sense of time,” one of the team’s leaders, Oleksii Nikitin, told the Kyiv Post.
The idea of organizing secret parties came to the Limb group after some of them went on vacation in early July to the beach resort of Zatoka, on the shores of the Black Sea in Odesa Oblast.
The group of 55 friends stayed in a recreation center that, as it turned out, didn’t have either a bar or a club for partying.
However, the resourceful group bought some building materials and constructed their own bar and DJ booth right by the beach, Nikitin says. They fenced off the area, built a roof, and brought in a stereo system, a DJ and a barman.
After coming back to Kyiv, 15 members of the vacation group started discussing the idea of arranging similar parties in Kyiv.
“We liked it so much that we wanted to do something like this here,” said another Limb member, Evhenia Mitsitis.
Good organization
The party kicked off at around 9 p.m. as stylish looking youths with original makeup and clothing started showing up at the secret spot near Vyshhorod.
The organizers sold tickets online beforehand, and provided purchasers with information about how to get to the venue.
Partygoers could either take a bus from Petrivka metro station that Limb had rented, which departed every 30 minutes and cost Hr 50, or get to Vyshhorod on their own and then take a golf cart to the final destination.
The mysterious secret place turned out to be a patch of sand with some trees that juts out from the western shore of the Kyiv Sea, just off the main road. There, Limb had set up a DJ stand, a food court, a bar, and lounge zones with poufs and chairs. The site already had a covered dance floor.
Nikitin says that the place matched their requirements – water nearby, and lots of open space.
“We wanted people to feel comfortable here, like home, where everything is provided,” Mitsitis said.
Small lights and decorations hanging around the area added to that effect, while the powerful sound system called on partygoers to let their hair down.
Zahar Semenenko, an IT developer, who had come to the party at the invitation of his friend, said that he loved the party’s atmosphere.
“It’s a rush. Mini-Ibiza,” he said.
In the dancing area the organizers set up a long DJ stand and put up a white canvas behind to project a light show. Prepared by Skilz animation studio, the winners of the Kyiv Lights Festival, the light show complemented the electronic music and contributed to the intense mood on the dance floor. By midnight the dancing was becoming frenzied.
Experiments
As the party was essentially an experiment, Limb decided to test out new variations of two of the main components of any party – the music and the bar.
They mixed different music by combining DJs who had never before played in one lineup. Performing at the party were Capacityhouse, Ptakh, SHU, Vaia, Shtenge, Guy Richard, Mjunior, and Pilarion.
Nikitin said that when DJs perform together, they adjust their music and create a unique style that emerges from the whole lineup.
The risk paid off, with some visitors saying the DJ lineup had been the main reason they had come.
Two friends, analyst Kseniia Oush and a project manager Evhenii Mashyna, are regular visitors to electronic music parties and festivals in Kyiv.
They spotted the event on Facebook and attended precisely because of the lineup.
Oush said that apart from music, she liked the organization of the event and would probably come to a Limb party again.
Mashyna agreed, added that he liked the secret party format as “an unknown location is always interesting.”
As for the bar: Limb created their own bar menu with thirteen drinks concocted from a range of liquors.
Mitsitis says they didn’t want to bring in a bar service, so they pre-mixed beverages that suited their taste.
“It is not a big variety of drinks, but all of them are of a good quality,” she said.
Mitsitis says that Limb has lots of other ideas that couldn’t all be tested at one party – they will be used later.
“We will change location, will add new entertainment elements,” she said.
Nikitin said that although the party had been secret, there had been too much spoiler information released ahead of the event. Next time, Limb will make their party much more mysterious, he said.
But he’s keeping tight-lipped about the details of the next event, only saying that it will be held in around a month.
“There’s a fine line between drawing a veil to keep up interest, and revealing too much,” Nikitin said.
