Danceteria

Overview

Multi-floor Manhattan nightclub co-founded by Jim Fouratt and Rudolf Piper that fused new wave, post-punk, hip-hop, video art, and live performance across simultaneous rooms, and an early workplace for Madonna and the Beastie Boys. Fouratt's Gay Liberation Front background kept AIDS benefit programming on the calendar from the club's early years.

The first Danceteria opened May 9, 1980 on West 37th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues (in the former Armageddon space), launched by German-born impresario Rudolf Piper and activist-promoter Jim Fouratt (a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front who had come of age at Stonewall) with around $25,000 in rented fixtures. The format was unusual for 1980: a basement dance floor where Mark Kamins and Sean Cassette traded two-to-three-record sets of punk, funk, disco, and electro at 12-hour stretches; a first-floor live-band stage (Devo, Gang of Four, Sun Ra, Ministry, Tito Puente all played); and a second-floor video lounge programmed by video artists Emily Armstrong and Pat Ivers who screened CBGB footage alongside independent film. The 37th Street run lasted five months before an October 4, 1980 raid in which 35 people (including staff and artists) were arrested for operating without a liquor license; authorities reportedly found the dance floor covered in pills. A brief run at the Peppermint Lounge on West 45th Street followed, then collapsed under management conflicts. In February 1982 John Argento hired Fouratt and Piper to program a four-floor industrial building at 30 West 21st Street; three months later Argento and Piper parted with Fouratt and brought in Ruth Polsky as talent booker, and it was under Polsky that the club reached its peak. The 21st Street Danceteria held roughly 2,000 on peak nights. Floor one was the main dance floor; floor two housed the live performance stage (also DJ'd by Anita Sarko and Johnny Dynell, who shared residency with Mark Kamins); floor three hosted the video lounge, redesigned for this location and credited to video artists John Sanborn and Kit Fitzgerald, who programmed Nam June Paik, Kenneth Anger, David Lynch, and early music videos in what was widely noted as one of the city's first dedicated video-art nightclub spaces; floor four was Congo Bill, a bar and VIP room where Sarko also played. A seasonal rooftop bar called Wuthering Heights and a restaurant rounded out the building. Rudolf Piper, a trained architect, designed the interiors with 1950s-style wallpaper and motifs as satirical references, commissioning Keith Haring for xerox-art wall pieces. The house sound mixed post-punk, new wave, electro, and early hip-hop, a deliberate no-walls policy that drew Latin Fun House kids, Black hip-hop crowds, and downtown art-world regulars onto the same floors on the same night. The people who worked there constitute a roll call of the early 1980s downtown: the Beastie Boys were busboys; LL Cool J ran the elevator; Keith Haring worked coat check; Sade tended bar; Debi Mazar worked as an elevator attendant; Karen Finley performed. Haoui Montaug served as doorman and ran 'No Entiendes,' a roving cabaret revue hosted at Danceteria that on December 16, 1982 gave Madonna her first solo live performance (before roughly 300 people). Mark Kamins had been playing her demo 'Everybody' in his DJ sets and subsequently introduced her to Sire Records A&R, setting her career in motion. Russell Simmons hosted hip-hop talent showcases on Wednesdays. Ann Magnuson staged themed events. Jim Fouratt, citing his Gay Liberation Front background, kept AIDS benefit programming at the club from its earliest years, he has stated on record that 'the first AIDS benefit was at Danceteria.' The 21st Street location appeared as the disco scene in Susan Seidelman's film Desperately Seeking Susan (1985). Rising rents closed the 21st Street Danceteria in 1986; Ruth Polsky died in a car accident on September 7 of that year, having helped define the club's most important chapter. A third iteration ran from 1990 to 1993 at the Martha Washington Hotel, 30 East 30th Street, with Kamins, Johnny Dynell, Walter V, and Freddy Bastone as DJs. A Hamptons outpost operated in Water Mill, New York, from approximately 1984 to 1995. The 21st Street building sold in 2008 for a planned luxury condo conversion that was abandoned by year-end. Jim Fouratt's papers (including Danceteria flyers and promotional materials) are held in the Jim Fouratt Papers at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (GEN MSS 1141).

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