One Saturday evening last October, I made my way to Bloc nightclub in east London's Hackney Wick, an area home to factories, artist's studios, the 2012 Olympic Stadium, and grotty warehouse raves. The occasion was Chapter 10 , a recurring gay night that champions techno, house, and disco where Honey Dijon was set to headline. However, many people, myself included, had arrived early to catch a performance by Young Boy Dancing Group —a collective of contemporary dancers from across Europe whose performances are a mishmash of queerness and techno-futurism that could only exist in our digital age.

Upon entering the venue's main room, it felt like some sort of Wiccan ritual was going on: candles marked out a large circle in the center of the dancefloor. A male performer with a jockstrap in the center of his face, a blonde woman with weave tracks repurposed as a belt, and other performers in bondage-y short shorts grazed through the space slowly. They waved metal amulets reminiscent of clergymen's incense burners in the air to a chant-heavy tune from the Ghost in the Shell soundtrack, before crawling all over each other in what looked like a refined game of Twister.

Young Boy Dancing Group don't only perform in a nightclub context, though. Their performance that night coincided with Frieze Art Fair, and since 2014, they've put on several shows in art world settings, including the Lithuanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Manifesta: The European Biennial of Contemporary Art in Zurich, Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam, and MAMA in Rotterdam.

Then, they scurried off to various corners of the room, and each inserted a green laser into their anuses. The performance quickly became total mayhem, with group members flailing wildly, creating a mosh pit, and running amok to a pitched-down, jittery dance remix of Enya's "Only Time."

Prancing around art galleries with a laser in your butt could be seen as silly, or a cheap gimmick to demand viewers' attention. However, curator Mette Woller—who included Young Boy Dancing Group in an exhibition called "The Curves of the World" at Chart Art Fair in Copenhagen late last summer—explained to me that this seemingly outré act is deliberate. "They challenge notions of gender and sexuality and constantly question institutionalized settings," she asserts. "It makes you either cry or get offended."

To find out more about the concepts of queerness and sexuality behind Young Boy Dancing Group's work, I recently spoke to one of the group's co-founders, the Swiss-born Manuel Scheiwiller, who was "escaping the winter" on a jaunt to Puerto Rico and Cuba at the time. Check YBDG's Facebook page for upcoming performances, because trust me, you haven't lived until you've seen fluorescent laser light refracted in a million different directions off of a disco ball, the source of which is some dude's asshole.

THUMP: Do most of Young Boy Dancing Group's members have formal dance training? And, is there a core set of members?