For the entirety of history, it’s been impossible to detach the notion of “underground” from a sense of identity.You think of the Black gays in Chicago’s Warehouse dancing to Frankie Knuckles in 1986. You think of the ballroom queens in Paris is Burning in 1992, the New York Puerto Ricans owning the Copacabana, the Detroit techno heads, the nineties U.K. ravers.And it’s time to think of Cleveland. No knock on the Flats, but it’s more relevant than ever, we think, to take stock of the city’s off-the-beaten-path clubs where Clevelanders gather, where they seek refuge in the sweet trance of a kick-and-drum, sip champagne to backpack rap, put flowers in their hair and dangle from the ceiling. If underground is where identity is brewed, it feels like Cleveland’s cup is brimming to the rim in the years ahead.As a nighthawk myself, I’ve grown fond of the DJs in hidden space, of the post-2 a.m. romps at Touch or La Cave du Vin that more resemble meditation than any night out with the boys. More than ever, as yet another political storm cloud rolls in, more and more of us are going to seek the distinct communion one can only get with smaller congregation. Of the diehards, of the skilled, of the drunk, the beautiful and the slightly deranged.Here are 12 places where you can do just that.What may be the latest addition to Cleveland’s resurfacing house scene may also be its most charismatic. Located underneath the also recently opened bar on West 25th, Clandestina, Smoke & Mirrors is what ravers might get if they brought lights and smoke to subterranean catacombs in Southern Mexico. There are walls splayed with oval mirrors, wax-dripping candles, a backroom stone archway that apparently used to tunnel to the bank across the street. Dancing to Sound on Tape spin a Moloko track, drinking Martini & Rossi near a lit Christmas tree, I felt as if I was moving my body to some kind of secret resurrection. (My own?) “You’re just in this escape where you kind of get away from the world,” owner Sam McNulty told me. “And we can party very hard down there, and you would never know it.”What happens when a Serbian family takes over a former male strip club in the Warehouse District? Something exactly like Elite Lounge. Run by Valentina Lucic, a veteran of the Flats East Bank scene, she and her husband opened up a club above Tomo on West 9th in 2023 with intention to cut through Downtown’s saturated dance scene with a more Eastern European touch. Here, amid the lion statuettes and mirror wall, you can drink to Zana’s “Dodirni mi Kolena” (a newfound favorite of mine) or the occasional American Top 40, if the DJ allows it. Around 2 a.m. recently, Lucic’s niece, manager Lidija Tolo, pulled me into an impromptu Serbian kolo dance, an oscillating arm-linked circle of women with dark eye shadow and white cocktail dresses. Tolo lifted my hand as we stepped. “You’re doing good,” she said.For the past four decades, this postcard-sized building off West 117th and Lorain has been one of the handful of spots where Cleveland’s gay community could gather in peace. And under a handful of names: MJ’s, Apex. Today, it’s Vibe, run by husband-and-husband duo Kevin and John Briggs, and a suitable home for anyone—not just LGBTQ folks—who blossoms while dancing to Nicki Minaj or Dua Lipa underneath a spinning disco ball. (Like me.) If you’re lucky, you’ll catch a night populated by visiting go-go dancers, drag queens in towering red, or a swaggering collection of men at leather-focused Gear Night. At least, in Briggs’ mind, before the country tries to ban it. “As a gay man myself, it's scary to go out now that a new administration is going to come,” he told me. “We have to keep safe spaces for everybody. I mean, [John and I] have no idea what could happen to our marriage!”I want you to imagine your ideal Latin American dance club. Think of the Corona chelas (beer buckets), the silver table hookahs, the multicolored stage exuding mist and flash and head lights that trickle down like waterfalls. That’s Mayans Lounge in brief. Taken over by Louis Mayans and his daughter Helen in 2022, when the club was called Belinda’s, the family’s gymnasium-sized Puerto Rican nightclub on Madison Avenue is a beacon of life in the West Eighties. I bought a $5 Modelo, then soon found myself salsa-ing to Elvis Crespo’s “Suavemente” with an otherwise timid darkhaired woman in her late thirties, as a UFC match played on the TV screen above us. Can life get any more thrilling?A byproduct of Ciara Ahern’s re-imagining, with husband Sam McNulty, of Bar Cento and Bier Market, Bird of Paradise is pretty much a tropical-ization of the Speakeasy bar that came before it. The couple strove for a “jungly vibe” for the underground counterpart to Bright Side’s swank, McNulty told me, with its accompanying greens and golds, birdcage VIP lounges and feather-y bar lights that float above you like Russian ushankas. Expect a lot of guys in plaid flannel hoodies and girls in jean skirts and knee-high boots holding High Noons. On a recent Saturday, I bought gin and tonics and danced to Fergie and “The Dipset Anthem” near the DJ booth. Paradise? In every sense of the word.Two years ago, in the summer of 2022, 30-year-old Josh Tang opened up his living room in Cleveland Heights for dancers trying to avoid the existential ills of a global pandemic. These days, Tang and his friends at Burning River Blues have rented space at The Brownhoist in Midtown, following a major conversion of one of Cleveland’s oldest buildings by Adam Whiting. Typically held in a second-floor party room alit in purple, one of Tang’s recent blues dances was moved temporarily to some former legal offices on the Brownhoist’s third floor. My dance partner and I shuffled through wannabe swing and ballroom steps to Etta James. “It’s a low-barrier-to-entry dance with a high-skill ceiling,” Tang told me after. “But you can get into it very easily.”This is the kind of place that slaps you in the face when you walk in. Herein lies a hodgepodge of dive bar and city museum: deer heads, Browns helmets, parking meters, clock radios, an actual police side door on the wall. (Owner Chuck Judd is a former CPD officer, mind you.) “I wouldn’t necessarily say we have an identity crisis, but…” manager Andrea Vann told me. “We’re eclectic, I’ll say.” Underneath the ceiling of sports pennants is what I’m interested in: a small slice of dance floor home to three of Judd’s regular DJs—DJ Raven, DJ John Doe and Kosherkuts. On a recent Wednesday, John Doe played Aesop Rock and Circadian as a melange of ravers got down in their bandanas and light-up Gucci backpacks. “We’ll have tight dresses, people coming here to dance in their pajamas,” Vann said. “Girls with hula hoops, with light sticks and everything. It’s a great little crew.”It’s no secret after a few nights at Viva that people come to the city’s largest salsa studio for a multiplicity of reasons. To meet friends or a future fiancé. (I know two.) To replace past highs, like rock climbing or skydiving. And of course to learn just about every dance in the Afro-Latin diaspora. On any given week, as I myself have done for two years now, you can head to Viva’s Thursday night social at Asian Town Center, where dozens join owners Rebecca Sweet, Parker Amsel and Heriberto Perez in three hours of no-pressure salsa or bachata, group cha-cha-cha-ing and African kizomba so sensual it might discomfit a nun. A kind of musical awakening Sweet says is Viva’s specialty. “Like, if you go to the orchestra and you hear classical music, it's the same,” she told me. “It's just a compass. It's a different genre. And so you feel the same sense of euphoria.”Oh, B-Side, the undisputed underground gem of Coventry, the host of a myriad hip hop shows, bespoke open mics and the infrequent basement wrestling match-slash-hardcore show. Yet the B-Side Liquor Lounge we all know one way or another is rearing its head from its summer fire as a notable stop in the city’s dance scene—with its hip-hop or house tinged Night Grooves and Hoochie Nights. I returned to the Grog Shop sibling on a recent Friday for B-Side’s K-Pop Night, which, besides introducing me to the music of BLACKPINK and Mamamoo, unveiled the diversity of K-Pop’s devotees, from dreaded college twentysomethings to white women gyrating in cowgirl blouses. Oh, and I took home a glow stick.A few blocks south of the Asian Town Center at 1790 East 43rd, you’ll find a totally nondescript and eerie warehouse awash in industrial red brick. That’s actually, you must know, the Duality Complex, a multi-use artist pop-up space founded by entrepreneur Amir Caldwell. It’s also the home of the Midnight Art Club, Cleveland’s best shot at a Burning Man affiliate. And, just like they did in early November, Midnight hosted a kaleidoscopic Halloween party good enough for Black Rock City itself: fire-jugglers in black suspenders, aerial dancers in fishnets, pole dancers in bejeweled socks. All before Midnight’s 600-square-foot cathedral art installation. “We have EDM with lyra hoop dancers,” co-founder Dave Biro told me. “So it can really, really run across the genre of what is possible.”After twenty years as a music producer, it’s no surprise Brian Conti is obsessed with sonic excellence. It’s what propelled Conti, after stints at the Rock Hall and The Agora, to open his own club in Midtown’s burgeoning house district, calling it the Birds Nest. Walking through the liquor-free warehouse off Superior and East 36th, through its Guice Mann mural room, its half-kitchen house space upstairs, you get a clear sense of Conti’s modus operandi: give the late-late night crowd Cleveland’s most underground of underground. “This is the afters for Crobar and the Winchester,” Conti told me. We stood before Birds Nest’s jewel: an Avalon speaker system designed precisely for house music. One, as I would discover around 3:30 a.m., that truly delivers the “waterfall” effect Conti promised it would. “You can actually walk through, and it creates an illusion of a wall of sound,” he said. “It’s the best in Cleveland.”If Cleveland is to find its spot on the international map of house or EDM, it’ll mostly be due to the rebirth of the Croatian Tavern. It’s now Crobar—as founder Gerard Guhde redubbed it upon its renovation in 2021. On a recent Saturday, Guhde, a DJ himself, invited Chicago House legend Marshall Jefferson to play a midnight set in Crobar’s tiny dance room. A scene developed as Jefferson played “Move Your Body.” A guy with a cigarette stuck in his sunglasses head-bobbed. A 40-year-old mother-of-three “reiki” danced on the dude in front of her. I myself shut my eyes to Jefferson’s hi-hat and jazz piano, doing my best to hold on to the sweet realm of space, to not drift off to the political hellscape lurking outside of it. “I feel like in the political state that we're at, it's even more important for us to create these spaces,” Guhde told me in the green room later, “because I feel like they're going to go away.”