ABOUT FERAL DANCE

Feral Dance is a celebration of the Bass in EDM. Come hear the Bass that moves your body celebrated on stage with our DJs. The Feral Dance crew will lead the way with Go-Go Performances and we will have Genres from Breaks to Dubstep in a sampling of the best Bass Music Minneapolis has to offer.

GET FERAL WITH US.

LEARN WHAT MAKES FERAL DANCE DIFFERENT.

  • Feral Dance has featured dozens of DJ’s from across the country. We aspire to provide a variety of EDM genres to really mix it up!

  • Our Feral Force dance troop brings the energy to every show! Their goal is to keep the dance floor going while being an artistic addition to our DJ’s set on stage. You can expect themed costumes and positive energy with every Feral Dance. Be sure to show your support with tips!

  • Not always in the mood to dance but you still like to enjoy the music? No problem! Our partners at 2D Con, Minnesota’s Largest Gaming Event and Community, have got you covered! Play some games while you enjoy the grooves!
    LEARN MORE ABOUT 2D CON

  • Our venue space at the Uptown VFW features a private bar filled with alcoholic and NA options just for us! Got the munchies? Uptown VFW has a full menu provided by El Jefe open until 11pm.
    EL JEFE MENU

  • Snap on-theme handmade Feral Dance merch during our events from 10pm-12am courtesy of Feral Dance’s designer, KikiCraft!

AJ Schmalenberger Feral Dance Owner

meet THE OWNER

AJ Schmalenberger is an Atlassian Certified Jira Administrator and trained in various Agile methodologies. He is an accomplished solutions architect, Experience Specialist and Learning Specialist, bringing domain expertise in Atlassian products, business process re-engineering, solutions consulting aligned with business objectives, and technical leadership to his clients. He is our go-to lead on Atlassian tool usage, standard methodologies and implementation, coaching and mentoring the project delivery team to ensure consistent performance and customer success. AJ leads technical design sessions and facilitates clear conversations with business and technical teams to drive project scope, expectations, and delivery. He translates business requirements into well-architected solutions that best leverage the Atlassian tools and provides overall thought leadership and best practice solutions to elevate implementation and organizational adoption.

He was the co-leader of the San Francisco Bay Area Atlassian user group and is skilled in gathering and implementing user requirements, developing training and administering Atlassian and Slack tools, from both the client and consultant sides of the table. AJ’s career spans solutions architecture, training and enablement, support engineer, web development, systems administration, project management at several notable companies prior to Cprime, including Atlassian, Fastly, Appco, Atlas Authority, MediaBeacon, KAT Communications, Grizella and TEKsystems.

OUR STORY

Feral Dance started as a brain child of AJ Schmalenberger after moving back to Minnesota from California. AJ missed the music scene that permeated the bay area and gave artists the chance to be more expressive and built a community around their mutual love of music dance and expression. There are many amazing groups of people that are doing lots of cool stuff in the Minnesota area but none felt quite right. After meeting DJ Evilynda in a poker chat room and DJ Theology at a hentai convention and Go-go lead Chia at a seedy Wisconsin bar, AJ started formulating a plan with them. What if we created the kind of music scene that we wanted with amazing musical acts that were allowed to play what they wanted to play and have amazing go-go dancers to back them up and get the crowd dancing hard. And thus Feral Dance was born. The name is supposed to connotate the wild and free dancing that AJ wanted to elicit but then it kind of became a cat thing.

Contact us.

Got a DJ, Venue, or something else you want to suggest?

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JOIN THE FER4L FORCE

Are you a professional or aspiring go-go dancer and are interested in joining the team?

Fill out our application!