We can dance if we want to, activists tell N.Y.

NEW YORK — Thousands of demonstrators shimmied down Broadway in the rain Saturday in an extravagant, ecstatic protest against the city’s 80-year-old cabaret laws, which ban dancing in eating and drinking establishments that lack special licenses.

The protesters want the city to repeal the ban, which the state Supreme Court’s Appellate Division upheld in February in a ruling against the Gotham West Coast Swing Club and several other plaintiffs.

New York’s restrictive dance laws have been on the books since 1926, the height of the Jazz Age. They were passed in part to stop interracial public dancing while enforcing a Prohibition-era definition of “public lewdness.”

Fewer than 150 of the city’s 5,000 venues with liquor licenses have the dance permits, according to Metropolis in Motion, a grass-roots group that spearheaded the dance parade.