Project GLOW’s Secret Garden of Dance
Ed Bailey shares what's in store inside Project GLOW's Secret Garden, and at the future club the public calls Town 2.0.
Last year’s Project GLOW dance music festival made a lot of noise — largely for the actual noise generated by the booming sound system rocking the RFK festival grounds and all of Southwest D.C. for miles around.
Presented by long-running dance party promoters Club Glow and Insomniac, Project GLOW is back for a second year with another sure-to-be booming lineup of dance, house, and EDM stars — from mega-DJs Benny Benassi and Tiësto, to indie house artists like Wenzday, Noizu, and Kaleena Zanders, playing over two days, spread across three distinct stages, including the Secret Garden.
Inside the Secret Garden, festival-goers will find headliner Kevin Aviance, riding high with new music, leading a queer-focused lineup of DJs and performers curated by DJ and promoter Ed Bailey.
On Saturday, DJs Lemz, Keenan Orr, JJ202, Wess, KS, PWRPUFF, Bailey, along with The Carry Nation and Aviance, will work the Secret Garden stage. On Sunday, the lineup will include DJs TWiN, Tommy C, Jacq Jill, Makz, Xiver b2b AytonH, Abco, and Baby Weight.
They’ll all be stoking the crowd within a plush, garden environment created to satisfy the organizers’ request to Bailey for something “a little more special, that is not a stage that you stand at and look at a DJ.”
“It’s more of a creation of a dance party within the festival,” he continues, “where it feels more relaxed and more casual and kind of just like clubbing,” — that is, for thousands of partiers at once.
Bailey is especially thrilled to be presenting Aviance, his friend and coworker from the days of D.C.’s legendary Tracks nightclub, in his full, post-Renaissance glory on the Secret Garden stage.
“It’s just exciting to be working with him again, in a large-scale way, which we did for years and years and years,” Bailey says. “It’s an honor for me to bring him back and give him this platform, which he deserves.”
The two last collaborated when Bailey hosted a Tracks reunion years ago at Bailey’s D.C. nightclub, Town, another fondly remembered dance space no longer with us.
Bailey and his partners have, for a while, been developing plans for a new club, still commonly known as Town 2.0, at 1001 North Capitol Street NE. So, as Bailey plants the final seeds for the Secret Garden, we had to ask, how soon will D.C. be dancing in Town 2.0’s new garden of delights?
“Oh, here we go,” came Bailey’s bemused reply. “I just, today, was at a meeting and a walkthrough with a construction company to actually start the project. I don’t know if you understand that we signed the deal in 2019, but we have yet to actually take control of the building because the landlord has yet to finish the work that they needed to do to actually deliver us a building that could withstand being a nightclub.”
So the landlord of the 130-year-old former church building has yet to turn over the site, says Bailey. “But they are close enough that we’re setting up our stuff to get going the second they hand us the keys, which we’re hoping to happen soon. And when it does, who knows how long it takes, probably about a year for us to build it.”
And when they build it, the DMV will come.
Project GLOW is April 29 and 30 at the RFK Festival Grounds, 2400 East Capitol St. SE. Tickets are $120 and up. For lineup and festival info, visit www.projectglowfest.com.
For tickets, visit www.projectglow.frontgatetickets.com. A portion of ticket proceeds will go to Sasha Bruce Youthwork to help educate and fight homelessness in the DMV area.
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