Spotlight is the theme for the first Open Doors Casa Dance of the semester this Saturday at Casa Nueva.
Red, yellow, green, or purple — you choose your bracelet color and simultaneously your interest status for the evening at this weekend’s Open Doors Casa Dance at Casa Nueva.
Open Doors, Ohio University’s LGBTIQQA student union, has been hosting dances at Casa Nueva for at least a decade. Saturday’s “stoplight theme” dance will be the first Open Doors’ dance of the Spring Semester.
To follow a “stoplight theme,” when attendees arrive, they choose between four colors, each representing what they might be interested in at the moment. Red means taken or uninterested. Yellow means it’s complicated. Green tells others to “go for it.” A purple bracelet means one is seeking friendship or a platonic relationship.
“I wasn’t able to attend the last stoplight theme dance, but it had a lot of really good feedback and I think it’s a good idea to foster communication,” Sam Haug, an executive board member of Open Doors and a sophomore studying wildlife and conservation biology and global studies, said. “It was easier for people to talk to others and know someone else might be interested in having a relationship."
Haug will be sporting green and purple bracelets while fellow executive board member, Camry Carey, a junior studying sociology criminology, said she is choosing to wear green this weekend.
“There’s a lot of dancing, very wild. Everyone seems like they’re having a good time dancing with each other or just talking to people,” Carey said.
The dancing is sure to continue at this Open Doors dance with DJ Barticus spinning tracks from a multitude of genres.
“With the Open Doors dance, it’s not just one style of music,” Barticus said. “There’s a pretty diverse crowd that wants to go to open doors. They want to hear different kinds of music. (They) might want to hear an old disco song, a new rap song, electronic song. It just makes sense — everyone’s included as part of it.”
A 2005 alumnus, Barticus has DJed for Open Doors three times in previous years and is looking forward to coming back for a fourth time.
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“Even if you go back historically, dancing and disco has been an important part for the LGBT rights movement,” he said.
For instance, the Stonewall Riots back in 1969 at popular New York City gay bar Stonewall Inn was a major catalyst for the LGBT rights movement.
The laws about same-sex couples dancing together were so strict back then, Barticus said the club would signal certain lights when the police were coming so that dancers could switch partners back to guys with girls.
Barticus expects the turnout this weekend to be mostly students but said there is usually a good turnout of Athens residents as well.
“I think it’s going to be really crowded,” he said. “My experiences at these dances has been (that) it’s always insanely packed.”
Open Doors dances are just that, open to everyone.
“People (at the dance) are always just really free,” Barticus said.
@saruhhhfranks
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