Daybreaker

Daybreaker

By: Lori Smerilson Carson

Movement is one of the most important capabilities of any living creature. Humans are no exception with our many abilities which is why Daybreaker and their dance movement program has made such an incredible impact worldwide. Miami will be the host of this incredible sunrise and sunset event, the Have Fun, Be Nice, one hundred plus stop tour, so Floridians have the opportunity to participate on July 5th, August 2nd, September 6th, October 4th and November 1st.

Having the opportunity to chat with co-founder, CEO, Chief Architect of Daybreaker Radha Agrawal, she revealed some details about this event, and what South Floridians can look forward to.

SFL Music Magazine: Daybreaker, which started in 2013, is coming to Miami in July through the fall with the Have Fun, Be Nice tour. What inspired this?

Radha Agrawal: Oh, my goodness, where do I start? Daybreaker was born from a bold question. What if we could start our day with joy instead of stress? Like what if we could start our day dancing, connecting to one another when our cup was full? With the sun, when the circadian rhythm says to our bodies this is the time to connect and be energetic and go to sleep by 10 pm (she laughed). So, the question is like, what if we flipped the script? What if we made night life morning life? What if dancing was about joy not escape? That was kind of the concept. What if community could be built on substance, but not substances? So much of the kind of festival landscape can be an escapist culture rather than a return to self. Also, the ancient technology of dance I really believe in, and especially when you dance sober with the sun there is a technology of release, of coming home to yourself, of self-expression, of confidence building that happens, and that was kind of the spirit of Daybreaker when we started thirteen years ago. I like to say that we’re the mamas and papas of social wellness, really merging socialization and wellness together. Back then in 2013, people were either alone on their mats together in yoga class or on a treadmill with earbuds in their ears or they were sleeping, but there was never any socializing in the morning. So, we really kind of birthed this movement into social wellness where we want to be on the mat practicing yoga, dancing, connecting together, substance free, iconic locations around the world and do it with intension. Yeah, I think that’s why it took off. We started out in New York City. We’re now throwing parties in sixty cities and all seven continents. We’re a community of almost a million members. So, it’s been a wild ride (she laughed).

SFL Music Magazine: I read where you did a tour with Oprah Winfrey. How did that come about?

Agrawal: Oprah’s team member, she was one of our Daybreaker Chicago main community leaders and she left us to go back to work for Oprah. She had such a great experience working with us for the five years that she did that, she championed us from the inside and said, look instead of having Oprah, having her open every stop of her nine stadium tour with like a band that doesn’t connect the audience, she pitched to Oprah this idea of Daybreaker opening up every stop of her tour and really kind of designed a thirty minute experience that would connect the fifteen thousand attendees in each stadium in a way that was more meaningful and connecting rather than just a classic opening act. So, it was a really fun design challenge for us. Like when they told us we were going on tour, that brought us such a cool moment. Basically, we were on Zoom and Oprah’s team came on. They were like, “guess what? You’re going on tour with Oprah. You’re opening every stop of her nine-stadium tour. Congratulations!” While this is happening, the door knocks at our office and Oprah’s team delivers a beautiful neon sign, massive neon sign that says, “is it one day or day one?” (she laughed).

SFL Music Magazine: That’s very cool!

Agrawal: We went on tour with her and we got to really know her and the team, and she’s a legend and her legend is real and true. She’s a special, special human. Yeah, it was magical.

SFL Music Magazine: I read about the connection with the Belong Center that focuses on loneliness and the Coffee Club. How did all that come together? Is this an extension?

Agrawal: Yeah. The deeper why underneath the dancing and the glitter, Daybreaker was and still is a rebellion against loneliness in a hyper connected world. Against burnout in a hustle culture. We’re rebelling against isolation, disembodiment. Daybreaker really returned to the body, to ritual, to belonging. From the beginning, Daybreaker wasn’t a party. It was a movement to build real human connection, and make wellness joyful and communal, and start a global cultural shift towards belonging not just networking. What’s really cool that’s happening now is that there’s hundreds of coffee parties opening up all over the world, now that we’ve laid thirteen years of bricks for morning social wellness sober dance parties. They’re saying across media that drinking is over. That nightlife is dead, and that morning life is now the thing, and this is really cool to be the zeitgeist of kind of laying the brick and to see this in 2025. But Belong Center really for me, I wrote a book called BELONG Find Your People, Create Community and Live a More Connected Life. It’s both a philosophy book and a practical workbook. So, I have twenty-five exercises in the book that takes you on a journey to go inward to belong to yourself. and then a journey outward to go and actually create the community of your dreams. In writing the book and doing all my research and interviewing hundreds of our Daybreaker community members across the world, I learned that a lot of people are afraid to dance. They’re not in their bodies. They don’t belong to themselves first. They feel lonely. They don’t have anyone to go to. They came alone to Daybreaker. They had no one to go with. They made friends when they got there but the whole concept for Belong Center was, can we actually get back to the root of belonging? Like before the dance floor, you have to first belong to your body. You have to belong to your own courageous of expression. So, we launched Belong Center really with a mission to end loneliness and build a culture of belonging for people on the planet. I think so often when you think of belonging or loneliness, there’s a lot of pathology around it. Like something is wrong with you. There’s, oh are you ok? Here are resources to go and read about how to manage your loneliness, but actually what Daybreaker and Belong Center’s mission is to rebuild a culture that’s joyful, that’s fun. Belong Center for Daybreaker is a dancefloor, it’s a sober dance floor. It’s a large scale, I mean, you know, three hundred-to-five-hundred-person event. Belong Center, we have Circles Program, the Belong Circles. We do anywhere from twenty person circles to two-hundred-person circles all over the country. So, we do these circles that everyday people can join for free or for just a donation of like ten dollars, but they can come for free. We have circles in twenty-five states around the country, and it’s incredible to see how supportive these circle have been. Now what we’re moving into is actually training. So, Belong Center, our mission is to end loneliness for the culture of belonging of people on the planet. Our focus has been in real life activation. So, we’re so much as digital sort of in this sphere of trying to support people’s loneliness. We were like taking a stand. It’s way harder, but we want people to meet in person IRL, so that’s been a big focus of ours. We’re of course, very human, capital intensive, so we have hundreds of volunteers now all across the nation supporting us. We have a growing team in-house as well, but the circles provide essentially a seventy-five minute sort of curriculum where we help people understand where they are in their journey. Most people who come to Belong Center, they are usually in a transition. When you experience loneliness, it’s usually that you’re in transition. So, what we learn is that people who are experiencing loneliness are usually moving through a transition. We go through like seven or eight transitions in our lives from going to college and getting a new job, and getting married, and having kids, and moving, and getting divorced, and retirement. There’re so many different inflection points on our human journey, and in each of these transitional inflection points is when we feel the loneliest, of course. So, we’ve learned that’s really where we want to meet people in their moments of transition so we can catch them before they turn to drugs or alcohol or depression, anxiety pills, meds, all that stuff. Let’s actually heal with community which as we’ve learned is our most potent longevity plan as friends. It’s not the pep diet shots. It’s not the NAD. It’s actually community. It’s friendship, it’s social connection, it’s dancing. It’s being in joyful spaces and states and letting yourself go to places that are joyful without substances. That’s why Daybreaker to me is so potent.

SFL Music Magazine: So, what can Floridians look forward to with the Sunrise Dance show in July, August, September, October, and November?

Agrawal: So, two pieces. One with Daybreaker, we open with a coffee social essentially or a yoga class. So, Daybreaker is a three-hour experience in the morning or in Miami, sometimes in the early evening as well because Miami ends like the early evening sunsets. We do some mornings or sunsets in Miami. Sunsets are really cool. We’ve done sunsets for most of our parties in Miami which has been really, really cool. Thousand yogis coming out to practice yoga and then dance their faces off with us, (she laughed). So, it’s a three-hour event either in the late morning or sunset hour. The first hour is either a yoga class that’s sort of guided with beautiful live instrumentation, playlist music. Just a beautiful iconic location or we do a coffee social where you get to actually connect with people and meet them over coffee. So, we provide the coffee with your ticket. Then we provide the yoga teacher and then we have a full two-hour dance experience with like a horn section, jam-based drummer, fire spinner, break dancers, the whole thing in an iconic location in Miami all without substances. So, we serve free juices, electrolyte coffees, bites, like yummy, delicious bites, coconuts. All kinds of yummy things for the Miami community as part of your ticket. Then we have so many different partners that offer their food and beverage as well that they can just take for free. So, it’s a really communal event. It’s intergenerational, which is really important to me. One of our key, kind of market of success at Daybreaker is that we have little babies all the way up to Jane Goodall’s at Daybreaker (she laughed). So many elder magical beings, and we’ve had once four generations coming to Daybreaker. The great grandmother just passed. It was just devastating, I love her so much, but the three generations still join. It’s amazing! I think we’ve lost the intergenerational socialization in a world that really silos us in age groups like millennials, Gen Z, baby boomers, Gen X. Why do we have to label ourselves rather than just all be intergenerational, interdependent spaces? So, that’s really important to me as well.

SFL Music Magazine: Was there anything you want to add?

Agrawal: Yeah, we have our Belong Center circles in Miami once a month as well, so would love to invite your readers to join one of our Belong circles if they’re in a moment of transition. Then they can sign up for our Daybreaker events at Daybreaker.com or belongcenter.org. The last thing I would say about Belong Center is, and Daybreaker both, I think there is not enough spaces to go just as an individual human. Like you usually have to go with friends or people that you know, but these are spaces that we’ve designed that you can come alone. So, I really want to invite your readers if they do want to come alone, that this is very safe to come and do that and make new friends.

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