Hot Flash Dance Clash

Part of the BLOODY BEAUTIFUL movement.

Hot Flash Dance Clash is a performative artwork and a highly contagious dance battle. It highlights the sometimes sweaty, messy and unruly relationship that menstruating bodies have with technology. In this interactive public experience we are celebrating bodies that can’t (won’t) conform to the norm; resisting the machinic neatness of smart technology and perfect data sets. We embrace the “glitch” – mimicking exactly what a hot flash represents for people in real life. It throws people off. It’s the body hacking itself. Hot flashes don’t follow a pattern; they are random. In the same way, body data cannot always be processed or fitted to a standard curve.

The work is a mischievous feminist response to self-monitoring technologies and the popularity of menstruation tracking apps. Smartwatches can now track the slightest temperature fluctuations throughout a menstrual cycle and, through your data and training on the data set, predict your next period. However, the cyborg-like wearables in Hot Flash Dance Clash are an antithesis to the slick design and operation of a smartwatch. Our heat sensors are ungainly, awkward (and sometimes even fall apart). They are visible to the naked eye with their long soldered wires and boxy designs. They are worn throughout the dance battle and allow participants to track their own (and collective) body temperature on a big screen in real time.

Playing with the never-ending obsession with data in the technology world, the work reaches a playful and absurd level of interaction: competing dancers resort to high energy dance moves, running in circles, kickboxing into the air – anything to get body temperature to peak. Unlike the opaque data collection of smart watches, Hot Flash Dance Clash makes temperature data hyper visible as part of the gameplay. And when a dancer reaches a peak temperature it shows up as a hot flash, often to cheers from the crowd. A DJ keeps the floor sweaty with electronic tunes and an MC hypes up the crowd. Many intense battles later and tongue firmly in cheek, the party keeps rolling with bloody cocktails, hot flash shots (our own recipe) and freestyling on the dancefloor.

Hot Flash Dance Clash was performed in 2025 at Doka (a basement club in Amsterdam) and during Dutch Design Week 2025 at the popular live music venue Effenaar.

Hot Flash Dance Clash was created by affect lab with wearable hacking & design by Patricia Nagtzaam and creative coding by Frank Bosma. On the decks DJ Guanyan Wu

Supported by Creative Industries Fund NL, Amsterdams fonds voor de kunst, Cultuur Loket Digitall.