Shake Your Groove Thing at the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam

The Dutch have a habit of hiding their best museums in plain sight, and the Wereldmuseum may be the finest example. The name belongs to Rotterdam first. On 1 May 1885 the port city opened its Museum for Geography and Cultural Anthropology in an elegant mansion on the Willemskade, a former Royal Yacht Club whose members had filled it with ship models and treasures from distant shores. That museum grew into the Wereldmuseum, a waterfront showcase for the beauty of craftsmanship from every corner of the globe.

Leiden brought even more pedigree to the family. Its museum dates to 1837, when it opened around the Japanese collection of Philipp Franz von Siebold, a doctor who spent the 1820s at the Dutch trading post near Nagasaki. It counts as one of the oldest ethnographic museums in the world, and its gallery of bronze Buddhas remains a quiet showstopper. In October 2023 Rotterdam, Leiden, the Africa Museum in Berg en Dal and Amsterdam’s beloved Tropenmuseum joined forces under one name, Wereldmuseum, which is simply Dutch for World Museum.

Amsterdam is where the family lets its hair down. The building alone is worth the trip, a monumental 1926 landmark on the Oosterpark with a soaring Light Hall that feels part cathedral and part grand hotel lobby. Inside, the programming is fearless. Permanent galleries such as Our Colonial Inheritance tackle the Netherlands’ imperial past head on, and the Unfinished Pasts exhibition drops visitors into the live debate over returning objects to their countries of origin. Then the mood swings. Recent seasons brought Divas, an immersion in the golden age of Arab music and cinema, along with Made in China, SARI/STATEMENT on the contemporary sari, and Bas Kosters’ outfits for WorldPride 2026. Right now Play! fills another hall with everything from ancient board games to smartphone games. This is a museum that treats pop culture as seriously as history, and it knows how to throw a party.

Which brings us to the dance floor. Through 22 August 2027 the museum has turned roughly 9,000 square feet into DISCO, a glittering tribute first staged at the Philharmonie de Paris and curated by Jean-Yves Leloup and Marion Challier. The show traces disco from the Black, Latino and queer underground clubs of New York to a global movement built on freedom and self expression, and it makes a convincing case that the genre was bound up with the fight for civil rights, women’s emancipation and LGBTQ+ rights.

The soundtrack never stops as you move through hundreds of tracks, videos, artworks, fashion pieces and design objects. Andy Warhol and Keith Haring share the walls with photographers Kwame Brathwaite, Michael Abramson and Meryl Meisler, who captured the sweat and sequins of the era. Gear lovers will find a MiniMoog synthesizer, a Roland drum machine and a guitar signed by Nile Rodgers, plus the story of how the 12 inch single let DJs stretch a groove into long, hypnotic journeys. A remix station lets you play DJ yourself, and the Soul Train room, a recreation of the famous television dance floor, is pure joy.

Afterward, walk it off in the Oosterpark and settle into one of the cafes of Amsterdam Oost, a neighborhood most visitors never discover.