Dancing in Paris!

There is dancing in Paris! And it's some of the best dancing I've ever had on the European continent.

All the more welcome because it has been so long in coming. I live in the heart of the gay area but while there are plenty of bars here, none of them have dance floors. And the people I've met thus far don't dance, and so can't help point me in the right direction.

But last weekend I found my street littered with placards announcing that my favorite party from Ibiza, Matinee @ Club Space with DJ Iordee, was taking up residence for the winter at Club Mix here in Paris. That one I wasn't going to miss, even if there was no one else there.

Which seemed like a possibility, because a friend visiting from the U.S. had gone to Mix last weekend, for that Hector Fonseca/Amanda Lepore event I posted about earlier, and said it wasn't a hit.

So just in case, I went early, thinking that if it was a bust, I could at least get an hour or so of the music and still catch the Metro home before it closed.

Leaving early was a good idea, it turned out, because the club was, typically for Paris, not easy to find. It is in a seedy area by Gare Montparnasse, one of the main train stations, about a 25-minute subway trip from my house. But while the address was given as 24 rue de L'Arrivee, it turned out that the buildings on the even-numbered side of the street stopped at 22. Eventually I saw a huge illuminated sign on the odd-numbered side and went in.

And descended into one of the most arresting modern club spaces I've ever seen. It's about the size and shape of the main dining room on one of those Atlantis Cruise ships, curving balconies and all, except that instead of the tacky carpeting and decor you've got sleek, minimalist railings, curved staircases everywhere and an amazing light system.

The place was empty when I arrived at about 12:15 (it opens at 11:30) but filled up quickly. They were handing out passes for this party in the Marais bars, good for free admission before 1, and it seemed that everyone had taken advantage of this because the line to check coats curled all the way back up to the balcony by 12:45. After 1 the pace of arrivals slackened sharply, but by then the space was about 80% full and stayed that way until I left at 3.

The French have more than their share of beautiful young men and this crowd had more than its share, even for France. Almost everyone was between 18 and 40; almost all were gay men, although a few women and their (possibly straight) escorts were there as well; and almost all appeared to be French.

I say that because of the conversations I overheard, but also because of the way people dressed -- the French are a bit more formal than Americans in clubs, and the crowd was divided about equally into button-down shirts, polo shirts with collars and fancy T-shirts, with only a handful of tank tops visible. About a dozen guys eventually took their shirts off; they were all unusually heavily muscled for this crowd and so I'd guess they were foreigners, since the French don't tend to have muscles. One was doing an excellent example of what Anthony Cheng calls the "white boys washing clothes" dance that you see a lot of at Alegria. The French dance a bit more loosely. I saw no real bumping and grinding and very little cruising/flirting; this was definitely a crowd that was there for the music.

And what music it was. I liked this set by Iordee even better than the one at Ibiza. He started off with a fairly mainstream house vibe but as people came in, he gradually edged more and more toward happy vocal trance, and before I knew it and without even thinking about it I was out on the dance floor shaking away. Then at 1 a.m. he drove it home with a dubby remake of "(You Got Me) Burnin' Up" that sampled even more heavily from "Love Sensation" than the original Cevin Fisher version did. About 20 minutes later he played an old trance classic I remember from Susan's turn-of-the-millennium sets (I've forgotten the name, but it might have been Solar Stone's "Seven Cities"). That was it for the recognizable stuff, except for Madonna's "Give It 2 Me" and a song built around a sample of Robert Plant's banshee wail from "Immigrant Song" (I wouldn't call it a remix, precisely, since that was the only recognizable part of the song, but it does mark the second Led Zeppelin reference I've heard on the dance floor this year), but it didn't matter. I was in heaven.

Almost totally sober, I might add, because the one bad thing about this club was the drink prices -- 10 euros ($14) for either a weak mixed drink or a bottle of water. The water bottles here are 50% larger than the normal U.S. size but that is still outrageous. On the other hand, the French do do something so totally simple and brilliant you just have to slap your forehead in frustration: they sell the drinks in plastic cups WITH LIDS, so they don't spill on the dance floor. Why no American has thought of that, I have no idea.

Those of you who go to clubs regularly know that "residency" is an elastic term. But it certainly implies that Iordee will be back sometime at Mix, and I'll be right back there with him.