Laser lighting display in the context of Light beam

A nightclub or dance club is a club that is open at night, usually for drinking, dancing and other entertainment. Nightclubs often have a bar and discotheque (usually simply known as disco) with a dance floor, laser lighting displays, and a stage for live music or a disc jockey (DJ) who mixes recorded music. Nightclubs tend to be smaller than live music venues like theatres and stadiums, with few or no seats for customers.

Nightclubs generally restrict access to people in terms of age, attire, personal belongings, and behaviors. Nightclubs typically have dress codes to prohibit people wearing informal, indecent, offensive, gym, or gang-related attire from entering. Unlike other entertainment venues, nightclubs are more likely to use bouncers to screen prospective patrons for entry.

Stage lighting is the craft of lighting as it applies to the production of theater, dance, opera, and other performance arts. Several different types of stage lighting instruments are used in this discipline. In addition to basic lighting, modern stage lighting can also include special effects, such as lasers and fog machines. People who work on stage lighting are commonly referred to as lighting technicians or lighting designers.

The equipment used for stage lighting (e.g. cabling, dimmers, lighting instruments, controllers) are also used in other lighting applications, including corporate events, concerts, trade shows, broadcast television, film production, photographic studios, and other types of live events. The personnel needed to install, operate, and control the equipment also cross over into these different areas of "stage lighting" applications.

A rave (from the verb: to rave) is a dance party at a warehouse, club, or other public or private venue, typically featuring performances by DJs playing electronic dance music. The style is most associated with the early 1990s dance music scene when DJs played at illegal events in musical styles dominated by electronic dance music from a wide range of sub-genres, including drum and bass, dubstep, trap, break, happy hardcore, trance, techno, hardcore, house, and alternative dance. Occasionally live musicians have been known to perform at raves, in addition to other types of performance artists such as go-go dancers and fire dancers. The music is amplified with a large, powerful sound reinforcement system, typically with large subwoofers to produce a deep bass sound. The music is often accompanied by laser light shows, projected coloured images, visual effects and fog machines.

Fuelled by the emerging dance scene, and spearheaded by acid house music and underground bands such as The Prodigy, many of the "acid house" parties were held in squats during the late 1980s. Well known locations such as the "Dole House" (Peckham), the abandoned bus station and the squatted children's home in Camberwell known as Groove Park had crowds of over a thousand. Full Moon parties were organised at Groove Park by Pete Marland (who went on to start the dance scene in Western Ireland in the early 1990s) and multiple events went on for over a year as an Art Collective sanctioned by locals. The Times' first colour supplement carried an article about the dance scene at Groove Park, though some of the organisers did not want to be photographed. While some raves may be small parties held at nightclubs or private homes, some others have grown to immense size, such as the large festivals and events featuring multiple DJs and dance areas (e.g., the Castlemorton Common Festival in 1992).

Calligraphic projection (also known as vector graphics) is a system for displaying or projecting an image composed of a beam of light or electrons directly tracing the image, as opposed to sweeping in raster order over the entire display surface, as in a standard pixel-based display. Calligraphic projection is presently often used for laser lighting displays, whereby one or more laser beams draws an image on a screen by reflecting the laser beam from one or more mirrors attached to a deflecting mechanism.

Analog oscilloscopes have customarily employed this kind of vector graphics, as did a number of CRT-based vector monitor computer graphics terminals in the 1970s and 1980s, such as the Tektronix 4014 and the Evans & Sutherland Picture System.