Legal ballet to end New York’s dancing ban

Dancing is technically illegal in thousands of bars, clubs and restaurants in the city that never sleeps, but New York campaigners are finally in sight of getting the law overturned.

The “cabaret law”, passed in 1926, requires public spaces that sell food and drink to acquire near impossible-to-obtain permits to authorise dancing indoors.

Those without the permit can be fined. Repeat infractions risk bar owners losing their licence to sell alcohol, which could in turn lead to bankruptcy.

Yet fewer than 100 of New York’s more than 22,000 bars, restaurants and clubs have the elusive permit, which is granted after mountains of Kafkaesque paperwork and jumping through prohibitively expensive hoops that Brooklyn councilman Rafael Espinal says unfairly discriminate against small business owners.

“It’s just ridiculous,” says the indignant 27-year-old Democrat in his basement office. He wants to repeal the law, which could be put to a vote in the New York City Council as early as December.

“Let’s finally get this law off the books so that we can go after the real problem, whether it be noise, crime, unsafe conditions,” he said. “Let’s not go after dancing.”

Espinal and pressure groups such as the Dance Liberation Network say the law has been used historically to crack down on neighbourhoods with large minority populations such as African Americans, Latinos and the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community.

The campaign to scrap the law has won the support of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who also agreed to another of Espinal’s demands — create a “nightlife mayor”.