‘Days Like This’ in Oakland Is a Party for the People, by the People

Update, Sept. 22, 2023: Days Like This organizers received a cease-and-desist letter from the City of Oakland on Sept. 15 for holding an event without a permit, co-organizer Morgan Simon told KQED. She said they plan to continue the party and are pursuing ways to do so.

Original story:

If you’ve walked around Oakland’s Lake Merritt on a Friday evening in the last two and a half years or so, you’ve likely come across a diverse crowd of people dancing to soulful house music, Afrobeats, hip-hop or funk at the lake’s Pergola. This is the Days Like This community dance party. And me and you — your mama and your cousin, too — are invited.

Days Like This is a free, donation-based event that hosts up to 300 people each Friday, but it started in 2020 as a party of two: Morgan Simon and Sulaiman Hyatt. The longtime friends who love to dance needed an outlet when the pandemic lockdowns hit and venues closed. So they would meet up outdoors by the lake, draw six-foot circles on the pavement to ensure social distancing, crank up the Bluetooth speaker and get down. 

When the portable speaker sound just wasn’t cutting it, Hyatt, a longtime community organizer, pulled his P.A. system out of the closet. “As an organizer, you either have a P.A. system or you know another organizer that has a P.A. system,” Hyatt says. “Hooked up a battery to it, got it rockin’, and we were off.”

Soon, they attracted passersby who wanted to get in on the fun. “Sometimes they’d see us dancing and people would be like, ‘Can, can we join?’,” Hyatt recalls. “And we would draw another circle on the ground. Then people were asking like, ‘Are you going to be here next week?’ It got serious when people were like, ‘Yo, how can we contribute? How can we keep this going?’” 

Simon and Hyatt put their heads together and started thinking about what it would mean to put on a weekly party more formally. They looked at events like Saint James Joy block parties in Brooklyn and LA’s Utopia (when it was held in Leimert Park) as examples. 

“Both of us come from backgrounds in political organizing and also in dancing,” says Simon, who runs a social justice-focused investing company, as well as the Orisha House Dance Project. “For us, it was the opportunity to really bring that together with an intentional effort to build this community, particularly coming out of COVID, when people couldn’t have access to nightclubs and other experiences,” Simon says.

A collective effort

One of the party’s early supporters, Mahasin Munir, appreciates how much Simon and Hyatt have molded the party since its early days. “I love that they have provided structure, rules, safety,” Munir says. “They provide all of these things and ask us just to bring our vibe and our support. Sulaiman has even cleaned up…and swept and mopped.” 

Munir, a friend of Hyatt’s, made the donation box and emcees on occasion. She’s one of a number of volunteers who help make Days Like This possible. 

At a recent party, Quanah Brightman, another regular, took on some of the pre-party clean-up duties as Hyatt set up the equipment — which Hyatt transports to Lake Merritt on a cargo bike.

Days Like This signs, hand-painted by volunteers, hang on the Pergola’s columns. Each week, three to five partygoers — who have completed a training in de-escalation practices — help with security. There’s also a therapist and a medical doctor among the regular attendees who make themselves available should any needs arise. 

Simon and Hyatt invite dancers to donate any level of funds to Days Like This via the donation box or a QR code for the party’s Venmo account. “We really wanted to have a community-centered party, and so we have four buckets where we split the donations up: DJ, equipment, organizers and Longevity Fund,” Hyatt explains. “The Longevity Fund [is] really to support needs that arise in communities.” Hyatt described a time when a dancer had their car stolen and needed help with transportation, so they collected donations for them. 

“It is deeply political. It is deeply intentional,” Hyatt says. And that intention is in the party’s name, as well — which Simon pulled from one of her favorite songs, “Days Like This (Spinna & Ticklah Mix)” by British soul singer Shaun Escoffery. The song doesn’t just get people dancing, it also represents the evening’s spirit. 

“Days Like This can signify beautiful, joyful days,” Simon says. “And sometimes Days Like This is however you might show up after some really major challenge in your life. Days Like This is wherever you happen to be on a Friday, and we want to hold space for that energy.”

One community under a groove

When Simon and Hyatt say they “want to hold space,” they mean it. Except for rain cancellations, the party happens every week from February to mid-December. “To be real, we’ve had some really fun dance parties out there in the middle of winter,” Hyatt says. “Not only is it dance, but it resembles ceremony. And ceremony, as we’ve been doing as humans for the past 300,000 years, doesn’t stop because it’s cold outside.”

The party welcomes all ages, abilities and walks of life. “We have the grandmothers down to the grandbabies,” Simon says. “We realized that if you made a party during the day — if you eliminated the alcohol, if you made it family friendly, if you created spaces where people from all over the community could pass by, where unhoused community members could participate — that you would just be able to create a much more inclusive space for people to get that joy that comes from music and dance.” 

Fidel Valenzuela, who uses a wheelchair, is a longtime regular who comes back week after week. “I enjoy dancing. I don’t let my, you know, circumstance define me,” he says. “So I still get out there. It’s just chill, safe. There’s never been no problems and we kind of do community policing ourselves.”

Jhunehl Fortaleza, who came across Days Like This earlier this summer, also appreciates the safety she feels to let loose. “I feel like I genuinely, 100% can be comfortable being myself,” she says. “Without having to be intoxicated, without having to worry about the male gaze, without having to worry about being hit on. And this place is just like really, genuinely people who love to dance.”

Simon and Hyatt specifically made the party to center dancing, and a dance cypher inevitably forms at some point in the night. People take turns in the center of the circle, showing off their skills, or getting hyped up by the crowd to try out some moves. Simon and a rotation of guest teachers even hold a weekly dance class at 4:30 p.m. for anyone who wants to develop more confidence in their dancing or get a crash course in house dance history before partying.  

The feel-good vibes at Days Like This haven’t only attracted dancers, but a growing list of DJs from across the Bay — and recently from Chicago and Sweden, as well. Bay Area native Eduardo Taylor, a.k.a. DJ ET IV, DJed the Aug. 25 party and has been in the Days Like This rotation since 2021. He keeps coming back for the crowd.

“It’s just the energy of the people, really,” Taylor says. “As a DJ, I play all kinds of parties and events and all kinds of music. But I feel like playing for dancers is the most rewarding because they’ll let you know instantaneously if they’re enjoying the music. And I really feed off of them.”

But you won’t hear just any kind of music from the DJs’ song catalogs. “The heart of our party is Black music,” Simon explains. “Whether that’s house, hip-hop, soul and the heart of our dances — voguing, waacking. Many of these dances come from queer communities and queer communities of color….And that’s why, in general, we hold a huge gratitude to Black communities and the music and the dance that’s created.”

At one point in the evening, Simon and Hyatt get on the mic to do a brief demonstration on consent, modeling through skits how to ask someone to dance, how to respond respectfully if the answer’s “no, thanks,” and ways community members might intervene if someone feels unsafe in an interaction.

“I think there’s something special around how we go about making relationships that ultimately lead towards community building,” Hyatt says. “We live in a culture that is intentional around the dissolving or breaking down of relationships. … One of the things I think about when I think about this party is Audre Lorde’s [essay] ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.’ It’s how we as humans can come together in our shared humanity to really tap into joy and an ease and rejuvenation with each other.”

And in one instance, tap into a lasting love connection. Sofie Lynn and Alvaro Contreras met on the dancefloor of Days Like This and later fell in love. When they decided to marry, they chose to have the ceremony at the Aug. 11 party. Dancers created an aisle that resembled a soul train line. Simon officiated. 

Simon and Hyatt value their role as a weekly party where people get to see each other on a consistent basis and build relationships of all kinds. “[The consistency is] part of what leads to that deeper connection, which then creates space for friendship, for romance, for whatever may manifest,” Simon says.

‘This is like church’

At the end of the party, Simon and Hyatt — who are strict about winding down on time out of respect for the neighborhood — begin what has become the party’s closing ceremony. They make final announcements and any dancers celebrating birthdays are treated to a birthday song — the Stevie Wonder version. Then the DJ cues up “Before I Let Go” by Maze featuring Frankie Beverly, as one of the dancers leads the crowd in the electric slide.

“It’s just this really great time for people to end moving in unison,” Simon says of the ritual, which is followed by mellow jazz to help calm everyone down.

“There’s something profound around closing the circle afterwards in a dance space,” Hyatt adds. “That ‘we’ll see you next week’ type of thing. This is like church.”

When the week’s fellowship of sorts is officially over, dancers thank the DJ and organizers, a few more bills get stuffed into the donation box and volunteers help Hyatt break down the equipment. And as the crowd disperses, smiling and sweaty from all the dancing, you can’t help but look forward to more days like this.

Days Like This takes place Fridays from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the Lake Merritt Pergola.