Dancers, Unite!

When idealistic entrepreneurs have tried to open dance clubs in the Kansas City area in recent years — and there have been several — they’ve discovered that this heartland hub throws up enough roadblocks to make such jollity nearly impossible. Enter Footloose jokes and spirited Bible Belt bashing, all set to the tune of a Kenny Loggins hullabaloo.

In truth, even the vice buffet known as New York City has laws against dancing. Such is the depth of America’s puritanical roots.

Perhaps a revolution is in order, a full-scale system change that not only legalizes the dance but also makes it mandatory. All right, so the promoters behind Saturday’s Dance! Dance! Revolution at the Pool Room in Lawrence aren’t advocating a governmental coup, but they have forged the concepts of party, politics and performance art for an event that promises to be uplifting — or upsetting, depending on how well you dance.

“We’ll have an area that if you’re in, you have to dance,” says Justin Riley, one of three organizers behind the show. “The enforcers will be there, and they’ll make sure that’s happening.”

The enforcers will be a group of uniformed security guards regulating the must-dance area. “Instigators” will roam outside that area, recruiting stiff legs to the dance floor. Meanwhile, movie screens will show stark films (combining stock footage of military scenes with original footage of enforcers) aimed at drafting wary wallflowers. “Part of it is patterned after old Communist propaganda footage,” Riley says. “Basically that mentality of trying to sell your idea to a large group of people.”

The premise of the show is that a subversive political party has formed to disrupt the status quo and that both its agenda and its weaponry are — you guessed it — dancing. An additional screen will display the live crowd getting down so that audience members can watch the movement grow (or fail) as it occurs.

The revolution’s “leaders” — all KU students — seek to attract the masses by featuring a wide range of dance music, including break-beat, synth pop, hip-hop, house, techno, jungle and industrial. And true to the event’s dark, insurgent style, the three promoters will DJ under the minimal names X9, J8 and Q3.

Like all savvy revolutionaries, the organizers are using economics as a tool to leverage their cause. Audience members who show up “in uniform” (black and red apparel only) get in for $3; the plainclothed pay $5 admission.

Riley sees Saturday’s event as an opportunity for attendees to take part in something more substantial and permanent than routine rump-shake orgies, even if they’re forced to do so at the receiving end of an enforcer’s shtick.

“Art tends to imitate things, and we are imitating things,” Riley explains. “We’re imitating ideas from politics and dancing. But the actual event is something you go to and experience, and then that’s it. You can document it, but it’s just a one-time thing. We can do it again, but it’s not going to be the same.”