When Dance Becomes Stance

It’s a genre that values experimentation over technical mastery and centers on gender equality issues. A style that fuses cut-and-paste sound collages with rock and rap. They call it punk feminist electronica--they being Le Tigre, a New York City trio headed by Kathleen Hanna.

Leave it to Hanna--once one of the most outspoken members of the early-’90s Riot Grrrl movement--to pioneer a new genre of music.

Hanna, 32, is best known as the singer for Bikini Kill, the ‘90s punk band that gave voice to women’s oppression and anger. Not one to be pigeonholed or to do what is expected of her, she is also an artist, organizer and political activist who for the better part of a decade has been the mouthpiece and role model for the Sassy magazine-schooled feminists who called themselves Riot Grrrls.

A grass-roots musical and social movement that began in the early ‘90s in Olympia, Wash., and Washington, D.C., Riot Grrrl encouraged women to reject traditional notions of femininity. Pro-woman and anti-corporate, its message was do-it-yourself, instructing young women to combat the rampant sexism they heard on the radio by making their own music, and to disregard magazines that told them how to look, act and think by making ‘zines of their own. Although the movement had no founder per se, Hanna was widely perceived as its leader.

Punk feminist electronica picks up where this girl-positive, guitars-in-arms movement left off, though it has a slightly different agenda. Where Bikini Kill challenged women to speak their minds, Le Tigre--which plays L.A.’s El Rey Theatre on Friday--urges them to connect with their bodies.

“We want to encourage women to take up space publicly and to dance together and to be present in their bodies when they’re dancing,” Hanna says.

“To be able to be physically joyous in public is, unfortunately, a radical act.”

According to Hanna, women, fearing rape or physical assault, often protect themselves by retreating from their bodies and into their minds. In the face of this “gender persecution,” as Hanna calls it, to dance is to make a political statement.

“It is an act of empowerment to publicly take up space and to dance,” she says. “Of course, we want to make the soundtrack for that, so ... it’s got to have a good beat.”

Like Bikini Kill, which wrapped compelling, guitar-driven melodies around its “Revolution grrrl style now” message, Le Tigre, whose latest album, “Feminist Sweepstakes,” came out last October, cuts and pastes samples from lesbian protest demonstrations, comedy routines and other seemingly undanceable sources into tracks bound together with body-moving, drum-machine beats.

Le Tigre is actually Hanna’s second venture into punk feminist electronica.

In 1998, after Bikini Kill called it quits, she morphed into Julie Ruin--an alter ego she adopted for a solo project she recorded in a closet with a hand-me-down sampler. Her move to canned rhythms and samples was a radical departure from the raw hysterics of Bikini Kill, and the album “Julie Ruin” (on Kill Rock Stars) drew mixed reviews from critics.

She formed Le Tigre in 1999, teaming with Johanna Fateman, creator of a now-defunct magazine called Snarl, and Sadie Bening, a filmmaker best known for her work with a children’s Pixelvision camera.

Their blend of ‘60s girl-group sensibility with synth rock was much fuller and more confident, catchy and playful than Julie Ruin’s music.

But the original lineup made only one record together, the self-titled “Le Tigre,” released in late 1999. Unable to devote enough time to the band, Bening left in 2000 and was replaced by her friend J.D. Samson, who runs a group to promote dancing in lesbian bars called Dykes Can Dance.

Le Tigre’s subsequent work seems more overtly political--something especially apparent on “From the Desk of Mr. Lady,” the 2001 album on which Samson debuts. “Bang Bang” uses samples of women’s screams and machine gunfire, while “They Want Us to Make a Symphony out of the Sound of Women Swallowing Their Own Tongues” features a male interviewer who doesn’t let his female subject get a word in edgewise.

It’s heavy and provocative subject matter, yet the group balks at being called a political band.

“What does that mean?” Hanna asks. “That we’re radical-left feminists or materialist feminists or Marxist feminists or what? There are so many bands out there that are right-wing or subtly espousing those politics by singing covertly sexist lyrics or covertly homophobic lyrics. Why are they never asked about being political?”

“Feminist Sweepstakes” is the group’s most overt call for women to put on their dancing shoes.

On its opening track, it declares it is “the band with the rollerskate jams.” In that mission, Le Tigre does not disappoint--on record or live.

During performances, the group takes full advantage of the fact that almost all its music is recorded, so it is not too loaded down with instruments to do a dance routine, choreographed by Samson.

Le Tigre’s “karaoke-hybrid performance,” as Fateman calls it, is also fleshed out with videos contributed by established female video artists, including Tammy Rae Carland, who also owns the Mr. Lady record label that has released Le Tigre’s three records.

Collaboration with female artists from a variety of disciplines is key to Le Tigre’s brand of feminism.

“If we only connect with other indie rock artists, it really is narrowing the scope of what we can achieve,” Fateman says. “We really want to build bridges and see what else is out there and see what we can offer people and what they can teach us.”

Le Tigre is as much a work in progress as it is a band, according to Hanna.

“It’s still in the developmental stage. I feel it could turn into a performance art troupe or a detective agency at any moment, but it’s not a totally defined thing like how a band is. It’s a process.”

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Le Tigre, with Chicks on Speed and Eraseratta, Friday at the El Rey Theatre, 5515 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., 8 p.m. Sold out. (323) 936-4790. Also Saturday at the Glass House, 200 W. 2nd St., Pomona, 6 p.m. $13.49. (909) 469-5800.

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Susan Carpenter is a Times staff writer.