Leisure and University Youth: in Focus the Dance Clubs

Abstract

The research aims to understand dance clubs as a form of leisure experience for university youths before to the phenomenon that occurred at the KISS Nightclub. The study is characterized as a documentary analysis of the journalistic media Diário de Santa Maria. Content analysis was used to analyze the messages. Faced with the precariousness of public leisure in the city, dance clubs have consolidated themselves as one of the main leisure spaces for university youth and, consequently, form part of Santa Maria's economy. The analysis of the articles in the newspaper Diário de Santa Maria contributed to infer about the direct relationship between youth, nightclubs, overcrowding and consumption of alcoholic beverages. The imbrications between university youth and leisure merchandise are a reality, however, leisure enterprises cannot be understood only by the business bias, but an articulator of encounter and fruition. To criticize merchandise leisure is not to deny its enjoyment, but to instigate awareness of the alienation and strangeness imposed by it, and of the struggle to be fought within the scope of the policy for the consolidation of public and quality leisure, as a right expression of freedom.