Disco Dolls

In its new show, Born to Be Alive, the Twin Cities’ sassy Ballet of the Dolls tackles disco fever. Disco is mainly remembered for the beat and the bell-bottoms, but Dolls artistic director Myron Johnson wants to reveal the human interior of the 1980s disco scene, particularly the sadness that pervaded disco lyrics and dance floors. “You would fall in love, they would break your heart, and it would all be played against that pulsing beat of disco that didn’t stop all night,” Johnson says.

If disco sometimes led to heartbreak, it also offered the glamorous solace of the costumes. “We would spend hours getting ready,” Johnson says. “You would make a character and go to the club.” One character Johnson met in the disco scene, decked in high-necked ruffled shirts and tons of rings, claimed to be an Eastern European prince. It turned out he was from Ohio. But, says Johnson, “he lived his life in that world as Prince So-and-So, and we all treated him that way even after we found out the truth.” The elaborate getups weren’t lies; rather, they were ways to tell a more complex truth. The character you created was “you in that moment,” Johnson explains.

“It was a time of fantasy,” Johnson muses. For gay men and for women, both restrained by society, “it was a hiding place. Inside, you could be anything you wanted to be. Outside, you had to be something you weren’t.”

The disco mood is a key to all of Johnson’s work because the Dolls are “very much a product” of that important period in his life. In the Dolls, says Johnson, “I’m not always concerned with how good of a dancer anybody is.” What’s more important is what a dancer can become onstage. He also doesn’t see himself as a traditional choreographer: “I’m not interested in coming up with a new step.” Instead, the Dolls’ theatrical entertainment is “more like directing a play,” he says—one that may or may not include a disco ball.

Oct. 23–Nov. 8. Ritz Theater, 345 13th Ave NE, Mpls., 612-436-1129