Slipping the Disque

The most fashionable dancing these days is done at a discotheque, which is really nothing but a highbrow version of a juke joint plus a disk jockey. But this simple formula and the dancing that goes with it is giving international night life its newest sights and sounds.

In Paris there are about 50 of them.

Chicest at the moment is a crowded hole in Montparnasse called New Jimmy's, where Novelist Francoise Sagan and cinema's Roger Vadim, Jacques Charrier and Jane Fonda turn up to Hully Gully. London's discotheques range from the superexclusive Annabel's in Berkeley Square, where Guardsmen, debutantes and top-drawer jet-setters can order an excellent full-course dinner as late as 3 a.m., to the come-one-come-all Crazy Elephant in Jermyn Street, where the beat is blue, the mood frenetic, and the Shake is the thing.

Big Game & Zebra Skins. Discothe-querie hit Manhattan on New Year's Eve 1962, with the advent of Le Club, a converted garage off Sutton Place. A thousand-odd members pay a $200 initiation fee and dues of $65 a year to forgather in an atmosphere that more or less suggests the living room of an impoverished baron in the family castle--glowering big game, crossed swords, a fireplace, and a half-acre tapestry. From a glassed-in aerie above the two-story room, a platter spinner manipulates the mood of the members with variety and volume, and things can get pretty wild as the evening wears on. But Le Club, which blasted off to an initial success that drained El Morocco to its zebra skins, is no longer the jet center it used to be.

The place to shoehorn into at the moment is Shepheard's, a fantasia of golden Pharaohs, gilded sphinxes, palm trees and desert tents, which is supposed to suggest the famed old outpost of empire in Cairo that burned down in 1952. Shepheard's, which opened last December in the Drake Hotel, is not a club--though that is not to say it is easy to get a table. It is also not a pure discotheque; a combo of drums, bass and xylophone plays along with the records.

What Fish Swims in Surf? Manhattan's other two discotheques are clubs. At L'Interdit, in the Gotham, the atmosphere is bistro--red-walled, checked-tableclothed and dark. The crowd there is young. Members under 35 pay $50 initiation and yearly dues; over 35, the tab jumps to $100. II Mio, in Delmonico's, makes no concessions to youth; the figure is $100 for everybody over 21. II Mio, which calls itself a discoteca, takes fewer chances of slipped disques; the music is almost possible to talk to--a situation that disgusts a gentleman called Killer Joe Piro. "There's no sound there," he complains. "When you go into a place the music should just force you to dance. It should knock you right out of your seat."

Killer Joe should know. A lithe, electric homunculus, he is Diskville's No. 1 dancing master, a hierophant of the subtle shades of difference between the Chicken and the Bird, the Surf and the Fish and the Swim, who has welcomed many a Big Name (Ballerina Margot Fonteyn, Hoofer Ray Bolger, Sybil Burton) to his unpretentious walk-up studio in Manhattan and makes about 30 trips a year to cities around the country to show dancing teachers how it's done.

The Frug & the Bug. The Twist, nowadays, is for squares. In its place is an open-ended series of variations on the theme "stay put." For centuries, dancing involved some form of horizontal motion, but the population explosion has said goodbye to all that; on today's sardined dance floors, a couple can only stake its claim to a piece of ground and stay there, dancing as if in an imaginary phone booth. The feet are rooted to the spot, though there is plenty of motion--callipygian, pelvic, mammary, cranial and gesticulatory.

The pelvis gets all the play in the Frug, twitching sexily from side to side while the hands make slow and sensuous gestures. The Frug is not to be confused with the Bug, in which one dancer twitches and scratches his entire body as if infested with insect life, then passes "the bug" to his partner. The Wobble is a group dance like the Hully Gully, with charade-style steps and gestures such as the Push, the Frankenstein, the Popeye and the Barrel.

Charades, in fact, supply much of the variety in discotheque dancing, and most of them speak for themselves: the Monkey, the Pony, the Bird, the Snake, the Heat Wave, the Hitchhiker.

Like the Twist, most discotheque dancing keeps partners apart, but on the West Coast they are discovering that there is something to be said for ventroventral variations. Such are the Dog, the Fish and the Swim, which has been banned in at least one Cali fornia high school. And such is the newest--the GoGo.

The GoGo is the product of Los Angeles' two-month-old discotheque, the Whisky a GoGo. The head arcs back and forth, the arms chop up and down, the feet are planted. And the bodies, glued together abdomen to abdomen, endlessly twist, twitch and bounce. In a glass-walled booth suspended from the ceiling over the GoGo's GoGoing couples, a pretty eyeful slaps on new records and dances it all by herself. That way, it's called the Watutsi.

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