DiscoShow: You Should Be Dancin'
Shake your groove thing at Speigelworld's immersive dance party at The Linq
It starts in a lounge with graffiti on the walls and casual seating meant to accommodate guests ready to get down at retro dance club experience DiscoShow. Part salute to late ’70s pop culture, part immersive production and part dancing lesson, DiscoShow takes inspiration from the past to create innovative audience-participation entertainment populated by roller-skaters, dazzling dancers and a major domo in the form of Ake Blomqvist.
Ake, who could easily moonlight as a resort manager on HBO series White Lotus, doesn’t come into the picture right away. The lounge scene is upstairs from the first floor, where Space Cadet serves the tables at craft cocktail bar 99 Prince before, during and after shows on a Wednesday night in February. DiscoShow shares it’s loft-like level with Diner Ross, where an unassuming corner entrance leads to an immaculate restaurant conception with burgers, steaks and Disco Fries providing pre-show caloric fuel.
With 4/4 beats pumping courtesy of a resident DJ, the lounge contains an atmosphere of casualness broken by roller-skaters Adonis, Apollo and Athena. The trio traverse the room to signify the proceedings have begun before circling up to dazzle assembled onlookers with agile polyurethane-wheeled acrobatics.
Our skaters will lead the crowd to GlitterLoft, a cube-like space inspired by the locations of early ’70s Loft parties. Legendary New York City party promoter David Mancuso established inclusive spaces where diversity was welcome and people could dance until dawn to tastefully curated music played through state-of-the-art pristine sound systems. It was the blueprint disco drew from and is paid homage Wednesday through Friday nights at DiscoShow.
Other historical footnotes touched on include the evolution of clubbing and the notorious Disco Demolition Night in Chicago’s Comiskey Park, but this gathering is about disco fever and the prescription calls for hi-hats, bass drums, Donna Summer and the six ’70s cultural archetypes from various backgrounds that drop their daytime guises to become GlitterLoft’s featured dancers.
That entails mingling with the crowd when they aren’t making moves on elevated scaffolding that rings the room. That’s where Ake introduces himself, motivates the gathered disco faithful and demonstrated basic choreography. Making motions of punching the air, capturing rainbows and encountering imaginary incontinent leprechauns quickly becomes muscle memory that Ake can conjure on command later in the show.
He doesn’t need to command anyone to dance though, as the show naturally draws fans or disco who are ready to get down and boogie. The sound system is perfectly designed for the room, the visuals are impressive but not overwhelming, and moveable platforms enable the cast to dazzle on the dance floor where disco never dies.
The party continues after the show concludes with guests having the option to stay in GlitterLoft or move over to 99 Prince for enticing drinks like Tequila-based Royale with Cheese or Diner Ross for a Delaney Deluxe Burger with Baked Potato Croquettes.
Regardless of where one is at DiscoShow the experience is guided by the sentiment expressed by a certain 1979 hit by Chic: These are the good times.