First, when there's nothing but a slow, glowing dream
On the strange, wonderful dream world that is Mawby's Bar in Flashdance
The thing you have to understand about wanting to study dance in a rural area is that very often it means taking classes and performing in spaces designed for very different purposes, like livestock or Sunday school or banquets toasting local business leaders or veterans. In the Midwest, buildings are made to be multi-purpose and functional first and aesthetically-pleasing a very distant second. This is why I had my 6th grade P.E. class in a metal pole barn next to the school. This is also why my dance classes were held in:
two different former stores on my town’s main street downtown
in the upstairs space of a sort of run-down industrial building across from the local newspaper
in another formerly industrial metal building on the outskirts of town across from a tractor dealer
a rugged, safari-themed Italian restaurant and banquet hall in the middle of nowhere
The last location—the rugged, safari-themed Italian restaurant and banquet—is not only the most peculiar, it also happens to be where I received the best, most challenging dance training in my adolescent years. I remember the space as much as I do the technique; I can still smell the sort of moldy/mildew-y scent that clung to the wet wood whenever it rained. And whenever I get a whiff of that smell somewhere else, I am instantly transported back there to those strange, converted studio spaces above the banquet room or just down the hall from one of the kitchens. If you want to dance, you find a way and a place to do it even if that place is really meant for something else entirely.
Flashdance (1983) is a movie full of dancers dancing in places really meant for something else entirely; even the prestigious Pittsburgh Repertory Dance Company that our heroine Alex (Jennifer Beals) longs to be part of inexplicably dances in what appears to just be an art gallery (which I’m not sure if that was an artistic choice or one made out of an inability to secure an actual theater as a shooting location). As screenwriters Joe Eszterhas and Tom Hedley and director Adrian Lyne depict it, Pittsburgh seems to be a place where the streets are brimming with dance (and considering the reality TV series Dance Moms also is centered around Abby Lee Miller’s studio in Pittsburgh, this is true), from talented, black teen breakdancers to even police as they direct traffic. For welder-by-day Alex, who has no formal dance training but intense passion and drive, she has found a home onstage at a local bar called Mawby’s.
The whole point of Flashdance—which I maintain is a vibes-only movie and likely an inspiration for Eszterhas’ later dance-centric script for Showgirls in the 90s—and it’s welder-by-day-dancer-by-night concept is that we’re supposed to think Mawby’s is a kind of sleazy, watering hole for Pittsburgh’s blue and white collar men alike to come together after work, drink cheap beer served by perky-breasted waitresses (it WAS the 80s after all) in tight tops, and watch women dance. Aesthetically, Mawby’s IS sleazy with its red-lighting (not very subtle lol) and dingy décor; especially in contrast with the well-lit, gleaming marble and mirrored, Yuppie, new-money restaurant Alex and (HR alert!) boss/lover Nick visit later in the movie. Mawby’s is where you go for hamburgers and cheap thrills, not lobster and women in fur coats.
Except that closer scrutiny of Mawby’s (or really just the character development or plot lol) reveals it’s not all that sleazy in reality. In fact, it seems like a mostly decent place to work, minus some bad jokes about Polish people and blatant misogyny from a few of its patrons. Mawby’s is really just kind of a dive bar with a stage owned by a gruff but lovable guy who employs the worst stand-up comic you’ve ever seen as a line cook and a bunch of beautiful women to dance for their fucking lives every night. They’re not even topless! They may remove some clothing and/or wear the high cut, butt cheek-baring leotards that were ubiquitous in the 1980s (including the Jane Fonda Workout), but it’s about titillation, not actual titties. If you want that, you gotta go down the block to the actual sleazy strip joint, Zanzibar, where the hardworking, fully topless ladies are just as likely to have drinks thrown at them as dollar bills.
You could call Mawby’s a burlesque but even that would imply more explicit sexual tones, which, frankly, only applies to some of the dance numbers we see performed in the film (including the famous water splashing one at the beginning). While I fully believe if you made a fitness or dance movie in the 80s, you were contractually required to put in a certain number of pelvic thrusts and gyrations (see also Dirty Dancing, Perfect, Can’t Stop the Music, Heavenly Bodies, Fame, Killer Workout), the dance numbers in Flashdance have more in common with the avant-garde musical Bette Midler’s character CC Bloom performs with the Falcon Players in Beaches (Sing it with me: “Oh industryyyyy whatever will become of meeeee”). The choreography is always built around a real concept and/or gimmick rather than having the sole goal of seduction/expressing sexuality. In other words, they’re real pieces of art.
I could even argue that Mawby’s has more in common with drag spaces where drag artists create their numbers around a concept and/or gimmick and have fun playing with different expressions of sexuality. Drag, like dance, is such a large and beautifully flexible artistic medium that allows for a full range and expression of styles within it. Some drag artists prefer showcasing their athleticism and flexibility—not unlike Cynthia Rhodes’ Tina Tech in her “Manhunt” number—while others go for eleganza, but there’s always a concept (because drag in itself is also a concept about how gender is just a concept!) behind it. Whether or not there’s also titillation and/or sexual expression is entirely up to the performer.
This is what I think makes Mawby’s such a strange place, because the dancing and concept behind it takes precedence over anything else in the bar: the beer, the thin burger patties, the class of the male patrons. Night after night, these women perform choreographic work on par with pieces from So You Think You Can Dance or even stuff I’ve seen at the Joyce Theater downtown. They use buckets of water, brick walls, strobe lights, geometric backgrounds, kabuki makeup, and enough body glitter to outfit the entire cast of an 80s fantasy movie! Who is doing the lighting and scenic design at Mawby’s? What’s the bar’s budget for that? These are the questions you cannot ask when you watch an 80s dance movie; especially one directed by someone who only made music videos and commercials prior to this.
In essence, Mawby’s is a place where grown men willingly go watch a killer jazz dance recital featuring a beautiful mélange of Giordano and Luigi jazz technique every night without the promise of seeing naked breasts. Which, if you think about it too long, is absolutely hilarious. And since they also serve grilled sandwiches, it is also dinner theater. Eszterhas, Hedley, and Lyne want us to think Mawby’s is the place where dreams go to die, but in reality it is doing more to support the arts than most state and local governments. It’s a dream world where dancers are given the freedom—and apparently the production design budget—to create bold, new choreographic work and also receive a paycheck (which cannot be said for an awful lot of “indie” theater and dance spaces in NYC :/ ).
My Mawby’s was that safari-themed Italian restaurant where we’d perform on the small stage in the main dining room underneath a stuffed giant elephant head (no, I’m really not joking). Sure, our annual studio recital was held in there, but a smaller group of us older dancers also did dinner shows there several times a year. My teacher formed a small dance company, and we’d perform half a dozen dance numbers for an audience of adults hunkered over plates of pasta and toasted ravioli (look it up; it’s a very Missouri thing). Usually, our shows had a holiday theme—Christmas, Easter, Independence Day, etc—but even within the confines of that, my teacher would come up with occasionally more avant-garde ideas.
I remember doing a modern piece to music from Apollo 13 where we wore black unitards and used giant red exercise balls as a metaphor for the oxygen leaving the spaceship. There was a number set to Phil Collins’ music from Disney’s Tarzan where we all played gorillas. I once did a modern solo to music composed from vacuum cleaner sounds. Despite the elephant head hanging above us, the strange optics of adults and families paying to eat and watch teens and twentysomethings in sequins and heavy stage makeup dance for them, and the hard unforgiving wood of the stage floor, like the dancers at Mawby’s, we gave it our all.
Like Alex, I had higher ambitions than dancing there even though it gave me the space to push myself in the studio and in front of an audience. If you have any self-awareness at all, you know when you’ve outgrown a place, and it’s time to move on. For me, that happened naturally when I went off to college. For Alex, leaving Mawby’s presents risk; she needs the challenges presented by Pittsburgh Repertory Dance but it means being a small fish in a bigger pond where everyone has had more formal training than you. Mawby’s is her family; it’s home. The place where she could cultivate her dance dreams.
The thing about adulthood is that it often means you have to step out of dreams into reality even if you’re still working to make those dreams INTO reality. Mawby’s is a kind of dream world; one where patrons can slip away from their troubles and dancers can live out their fantasies. Everyone who walks in the door agrees to leave the outside world behind for the one inside bathed in sexy red lights. Even heartbreak feels good in a place like this.
I wish Mawby’s was real, but it’s a figment of the imagination of screenwriters who don’t even understand the fantasy they’ve created while trying to project a very different idea to the audience. It’s not a strip joint but it’s also not a prestigious dance company. It probably smells of beer and grilled meats and cigarettes and sweat. Mawby’s isn’t even really a place; it’s a state of mind. It’s taking risks, expressing yourself, and being okay with failure. It’s working your thankless day job all day so you can spend your nights and weekends doing what you’re passionate about even in a less than ideal space. It’s being a diamond in the rough of Pittsburgh or rural central Missouri or anywhere that’s also kind of nowhere.
I’ll probably never dance in place like Mawby’s again and neither will Alex, and that’s okay. Those in-between places are crucial for artists trying to, as the song lyrics go, take their passion and make it happen. Without them, it’s much harder to take the leap into the very real places of our dreams. And oh WHAT A FEELING that will be when it finally happens.
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