Nightlife: Stayin' alive

For a lot of people, disco means the Bee Gees, Donna Summer and John Travolta in a funny white suit.

For Myron Johnson, artistic director of Ballet of the Dolls, disco means those things -- and a whole lot more.

Johnson's latest production, "Born to Be Alive," takes on the disco era as only the Dolls can.

The Dolls are known for taking classic (i.e. boring) ballet works and turning them inside out with an injection of comedy, sex and rowdy pop music. See: the group's annual Christmas romp, "Nutcracker?! (not so) Suite."

For his new disco ballet, which opened Thursday at the Ritz Theater, Johnson dug up a story near and dear to his heart -- his own. As a young gay man in the early '70s, his "Saturday Night Fever" looked much different than Travolta's. Disco is the soundtrack, but Johnson's story is about what was happening behind the music. Still spry at 55, he narrates the show, leading his cast of dancers (four men and five women) as they traverse the gay club scenes of Minneapolis and New York during this raucous disco era.

The first act begins in Minneapolis, where Johnson spent every night of the early '70s dancing in underground gay clubs tucked away from society's judging eyes.

"Being a young gay man, those people at the bar became your family," Johnson said. For these sequences, Johnson has reimagined two long-gone gay clubs. One, the Cabaret, is now a parking lot at 4th St. and Hennepin Av. S. Another was an illegal late-night dance club on the second floor of the building that now houses the bar Mackenzie, next to the Orpheum.

The second act moves to New York in the 1980s.

"Times had changed, drugs had changed and AIDS was now ravaging the community," Johnson said.

The pervasive drug use and unprotected sex Johnson saw in New York shocked him, but the thinking in the community was "we were going to die anyway." He brings this period to life with a scintillating scene straight from his memory of a New York S&M club in which dancers slither and coil around one another. During a rehearsal last weekend, Johnson talked with his dancers about keeping the intensity high during the scene, making sure the audience feels like they are having the experience.

"This abstract choreography should freak out somebody enough that they want to leave."

That's how he felt back then, he said. By 1986, Johnson was back in Minneapolis, where he focused on performance art. That year, he debuted Ballet of the Dolls.

Veteran Dolls dancer Zhauna Franks said watching the show will be like witnessing the recipe for what created Ballet of the Dolls, and Johnson, too.

"They'll see a side of him that they had no idea about," Franks said.