At This Club, the Motion Carries Along With Good, Clean Fun for the Footloose and the Fancy Feet

It’s a place for neophyte hoofers to discover their inner dancer. A place for recovering ballerinas to spit in Fokine’s face. A place for line dancers to step out of line.

Yes, dance fiends, DanceWorks is ready to begin in Laguna Beach, and its organizers want you, professional or tyro, to abandon inhibition and feel the music, a la the legendary bare-footed doyenne of interpretive dance, Isadora Duncan.

“It’s a way to reach in and find the dancer inherent in us all,” said Alison Brown, one of three Laguna Beach residents staging the dances, which will be held every other Friday, starting April 8.

“There are plenty of people out there looking for this kind of thing,” Brown said. “I call them closet dancers, turned off by the smoke and alcohol and mind games you find in bars.”

Smoking and alcohol are indeed banned at the 8 p.m.-to-midnight, city-sponsored affair at the Laguna Beach Recreation Center. Dancers of all ages and degrees of expertise--including none--are welcome. For $5, participants can hear recorded music ranging from hip-hop to classical, world beat to techno, jazz to reggae.

Though the first official DanceWorks is still a day away, a recent kickoff party brought a couple dozen men and women and a few children to the rec center, which boasts a spacious 11,000-square-foot floor and high ceiling.

Clad in leotards and tights, shorts or loose-fitting shifts and skirts, sweaty dancers twirled, hopped and undulated expressively in the dimly lit room, improvising every move to strong, propulsive rhythms.

Some wore shoes; many didn’t. Some danced solo, some in pairs, mirroring each other’s actions by suddenly dropping to the floor and rolling about or swaying arms and torsos like trees blowing in the breeze.

Participant Rebecca, who preferred to give only her first name, said similar opportunities for “do whatever you want” dance have been offered around the country for years. A former ballet dancer who trained at such leading schools as those affiliated with American Ballet Theatre and the Joffrey Ballet, she said she enjoys the “non-elitist” atmosphere here.

“This is a way for people to express their creativity,” the Orange resident said, “and I feel that creativity should be a part of everyday life.”

Chris Schriner, minister at Unitarian Fellowship of Laguna Beach, said he has been attending such dances for about 20 of his 51 years.

“It’s nice to have a movement situation where you can express your feelings with a minimum of (technical) structure,” he said between songs. “I tend to work a lot with my mind, and this allows me to put thinking aside and get back into my body.”

The event’s three organizers--Brown (a massage therapist), Vandano (a general contractor) and Felix Therin (a painter and stone carver)--recently discussed DanceWorks’ genesis.

Sipping cappuccino in a sun-drenched Laguna coffeehouse patio, they said the event is emerging phoenix-like from the ashes of Danceasy, which Therin, 53, began staging about 10 years ago.

Nicknamed “Mr. Dance,” he launched the affairs in a large artists studio he called “The Big Box,” where plays, performance art and mime were also staged, mostly for neighborhood friends in search of live, alternative entertainment.

“People were desperate for that kind of thing,” he said.

Eventually, however, Therin had to move Danceasy to a second Laguna location (the studio was not zoned for entertainment), and then, for various other reasons, a third and fourth, until, burned out, he called it quits in December.

But by that time, Vandano, 38, had been attending Danceasy regularly for five years, and Brown, 40, for one year. Neither wanted to see its demise, so they picked up the torch, enlisting Therin’s help.

“One of few satisfactions in life is to create something and pass it on,” Therin said.

Vandano, who will be a deejay for DanceWorks, said he will play an eclectic mix of such bands and artists as U2, UB40, Enigma, Ace of Base, Vinx, Madonna, Eric Clapton and King Sunny Ade, many of whom he rarely hears at dance clubs he frequents.

“There’s been music that I’ve wanted to dance to, but never had the chance or place,” said the neatly bearded conga drummer who uses the single Hindi name he assumed when first practicing East Indian meditation in the early ‘80s.

Soon, DanceWorks organizers hope to offer live music, such as a drumming jam by Vandano and cronies.

Brown, who studied ballet for years as a teen before branching into various ethnic dance styles, said she will lead an 8-to-9 p.m. warm-up or “guided movement expression.” This teaches dancers to “trust their impulses toward creativity” and direct their energy inward.

Explaining that most of us move through life in a robotic, linear fashion (standing, walking, sitting with spines rigidly erect), she closed her eyes and spoke of reaching deeper and deeper inside to live from “within-without, rather than without-within.”

“As soon as we can, like children, explore and open up physically, we find new ways of relating to each other,” she said. “That’s what we’re trying to encourage. This will be an unconditionally accepting environment.”

They expect that, at first, most attendees will come from the immediate area, but they hope to expand that boundary.

“We want it to be a place for people of like souls to come together,” Brown said.

* DANCEWORKS

* Laguna Beach Recreational Center, 515 Forest Ave., Laguna Beach.

* (714) 499-0610.

* Every other Friday, beginning April 8. Guided warm-up from 8 to 9 p.m., followed by open dancing until midnight.

* $5. All ages. Free bottled water and fresh fruit.