By Daniel Perez-Crouse
What started as a misheard Shakespeare quote became a yearly, beloved winter tradition for a South Tabor neighborhood where people dance and enjoy music during the dreary winter months.
Jen Berg and her partner host a winter disco tent outside their home that brings “joy” and “delight” to neighbors and people in the know. Back in 2020, it was born from a conversation where one person quoted Richard III (“Now is the winter of our discontent”), to which Berg and her partner heard, “Now is the winter of our disco tent.”
Berg said, ”My brain tends to freely associate different ideas and so it was just this thing I heard and we were like, a disco tent! Wouldn’t that be fun? We are in the middle of a pandemic. We don’t know how to engage with each other and we just moved into the neighborhood.”
So, they got a disco ball, a camping pavilion tent to put over the sidewalk, some spotlights, ran cables and got Bluetooth speakers to blast tunes at reasonable noise levels. The first year, people weren’t quite sure what to do with it and initially asked if they could use it, which Berg and her partner enthusiastically encouraged.
That first year during Christmas, Berg recalled one of the most notable tent guests. “I’m standing at the kitchen sink, and I hear jingling. I look up and there is a bicycle near the disco tent and Santa Claus is dancing in the disco tent with bells and jingling. It was the perfect Portland thing. Santa on a bicycle.”
And they’ve done it every year since then. They have also improved on it over time in the face of occasional weather issues. “The first three years, we used one of those pop up tent things. One of the roof supports got sheared off in a windstorm. So we didn’t want to cause a hazard and took it down. The second year, we anchored it better. The next year we lost it to one of the rain storms. And then the third year, we had wind and ice. So that almost full-on collapsed the tent.” Their most recent iteration is a homemade wood structure that they use as a greenhouse most of the year and re-purpose as the disco tent during the winter.
Something Berg noted is that nobody has ever attempted to vandalize it and it’s continually enjoyed. “People come through and they dance. People will go out of their way and off their routes to check out the disco tent. It’s just such a delight.” Berg says they enjoy the laughter they occasionally hear from children outside and figure that there’s an impromptu party happening. Some neighbors even came over to do homeschool lessons near it.
This year, there was a special needs class that would consistently enjoy it during their planned walks. “This was something that became so much a part of their world and routine now.”
Despite its title, the tent is not exclusively disco. There can be 80’s tunes, Christmas classics, Hanukkah songs and whatever suits the mood and vibe.
“The idea started out of this fun, playful mishearing, then it evolved into this way for us to get to know the community where everyone was distant and nobody knew what to do,” said Berg. “There are so many things in this world that are not joyous. If this is something that just brings some lightheartedness and playfulness and imagination back, it changes things. It changes the vibe. It changes the dynamic. Those are the things that allow us to find our way through hard things.”
Berg and her partner have had multiple jobs where they enjoy play, possibility, curiosity and imagination. “These are the things that connect people together. Mostly it’s just, we think this is fun, somebody else might think it’s fun, and they are experiments. And this experiment happened to be sticky. So we kept going. This happened to be something that was really resonant with folks. It brought light and joy into a time that was dark and confusing. But ultimately it shows us that humans are community-based entities. And it’s just something to come together around.”
Berg believes adults are big kids with shorter attention spans. And that we all are still that little kid we were. “Those moments of delight still light us up. Allowing those moments to live and breathe is actually the most important thing. Take a moment to play.”
Berg said the disco tent will return next winter. Find it in the South Tabor neighborhood near All City Church, 2700 SE 67th Ave., and Taggart Street Community Garden, 6909 SE Taggart St.
Disco tent at night. Photo by Jen Berg.
