It may be the only soccer game in which the players double as the halftime entertainment.
Just after Spain beat Uruguay 1-0 in a World Cup match, a different game was underway in Los Angeles on Friday. The players headed the ball — and shimmied to ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight).” They dance-battled to “Car Wash.” They shot penalty kicks to Donna Summers’s “I Feel Love.”
At one point, a goalie hung upside down from the goal frame, swinging to and fro. At another, a dancer did quick fouetté turns to Chic’s “Le Freak,” then fell to the ground in a straddle and twerked.
Was it soccer? Was it a dance performance?
It was “Discofoot” — and it was both. The brain child of the choreographers Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley, “Discofoot” was created in 2016 for Ballet de Lorraine in Nancy, France. Last weekend, in celebration of the World Cup, it had its U.S. premiere with four performances, thanks to an invitation from the City of West Hollywood.
The premise of “Discofoot” is simple: Get the ball across the field to score a goal. But instead of running or dribbling, you have to dance.
“The ball makes the choreography,” Jacobsson, 63, said.
Caley, 56, said, “It’s not settling on any one thing.”
“It refuses to land in performance or sport, in the campy, in the ridicule or in the high art,” Caley added. “It really wants to float somewhere there in the middle.”
In “Discofoot,” which has been performed in France, Germany, Sweden and Albania, there are two teams, two coaches, referees and cheering fans. But, in a departure from a traditional soccer match, there are also three judges, who score teams on artistic merit — meaning the team with fewer goals could win. In other departures, the teams must be mixed gender, a live D.J. plays disco hits and admission should be free. Jacobsson and Caley said the matches were meant to be in a town square kind of setting, where audiences can interact from the sidelines or as passers-by.
Oh, and the players wear tiny, shimmering gold shorts.
Though parts are choreographed — like halftime, victory dances for a scored goal and the blocking of penalty kicks — most of the dancing is improvised. The demands are extraordinarily physical while also involving the mental gymnastics of doing two difficult things at once: playing the soccer match, with its rules and stakes, while coming up with dance moves on the spot.
“The biggest challenge is stamina,” Jane Zogbi, 29, one of the dancers in West Hollywood, said, “not just physically, but the mental stamina it takes to constantly reinvent yourself and make new choices on the field, or just, like, make a choice. Period.”
To avoid what could quickly devolve into chaos, Caley told Zogbi to look at the whole field when considering her every move.
“It’s having that choreographer’s eye,” Zogbi said. “You can think about the choices you’re making, and then you can also zoom out and see the big picture on the field, and then say ‘OK, what does the picture need?’”
Before the game started on Friday, an announcer asked everyone to stand for the national anthem. For a dance performance? The area grew quiet. But then the two teams, gathered in the center of the field in a circle, began to sing: “Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.”
The crowd melted into laughter and the referee yelled, “Let’s play!”
An eruption of arms and legs swirled in the air: calypsos and piqué turns, backbends and hip thrusts. Some dancers did the Funky Chicken; some tangoed. One player decided the bench made a better stage than the field and grooved standing on top of it.
To block a penalty kick, a cluster of players formed a linked chain with crisscrossed arms and went into “Dance of the Little Swans,” the crisp and bouncy pas de quatre from “Swan Lake.”
During a slowed-down version of “Ring My Bell,” pigtails were pulled, a kiss given, fake looks of horror exchanged, all in slow motion.
“It’s wildly silly and playful, but we’re very serious,” Zogbi said. “We’re fully in it, it’s like a character as well as a piece.”
The 22 dancers, cast through an open audition, represent a range of styles. Some have conservatory backgrounds, some have done hip-hop and more commercial work. All were open to experimenting, Jacobsson and Caley said.
“If I’m just going to throw some people out there and say, ‘You don’t know one another, go ahead and start dancing,’ it just looks like someone’s birthday party; it doesn’t look like a performance,” Caley said, adding, “Improvisation is not just to shake around, you’ve got to make choices.”
Making choices and high kicking and tracking a ball — for 45 minutes straight (half the length of a traditional game).
“Once you start, that train is going and there are no brakes,” Doug Baum, the captain of the pink team, said. (It was pink versus blue.)
Baum might reach for jazz moves, ballroom, contact improv, tap and contemporary, though it changes each performance.
“I always love to give a good modern moment,” said Baum, 37, who dyed his hair pink for the big game. “Like a Martha Graham, a little Cunningham in there. And then, of course, the ballet bag. When in doubt, just tendu it out.”
The dancers had three weeks of rehearsals, with training that included soccer practice complete with scrimmages and a guest coach.
To teach the basics, Caley and Jacobsson brought in John Slocovich, a player with the West Hollywood Soccer Club.
It was apparent from the high-knees warm up, Slocovich, 37, said, that he was working with bodies that had serious range of motion.
“They could do some stuff that I can’t do,” he said. “I can go up to maybe my chest, but they can get their knee to their face, and that’s when I was like, ‘Oh, these aren’t your average new players.’”
Still, comfort levels with the sport vary. “I’m going to be so real,” Zogbi said, laughing, “when the ball goes out, I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’ Instead you’ll find me doing an adagio in the corner or something.”
JACOBSSON AND CALEY, who are both Swedish, got the idea for “Discofoot” in 2014 when walking through the Parc de la Pépinière in Nancy, where Jacobsson was the artistic director for C.C.N. (Centre Chorégraphique National) Ballet de Lorraine and Caley its coordinator of research.
Watching the meticulous footwork of a soccer match, they wondered: What if they mixed soccer with dancing?
“European football is presented in a very heteronormative way,” Jacobsson said, which got them thinking about how to expand the norms of the game.
And they’re clear that it’s not meant as parody.
“We respect it entirely,” Caley said of soccer. “It’s a very complicated game, and a lovely game. And it’s not a parody of dance either.”
The duo, who have been choreographing together since the mid-1990s, are known for creating pieces that reimagine dance spaces. When Jacobsson was the artistic director of the Royal Swedish Ballet (1999-2002), the pair made works that challenged conventional ways of performing in a theater, using, for example, hallways, dressing rooms, bathrooms and cafeterias as a stage.
“It’s this idea of always rethinking what the heck can we do with dance,” Caley said.
In February 2025, Caley and Jacobsson received an email from representatives for the City of West Hollywood who had seen “Discofoot” on social media. They wanted to bring the performance to West Hollywood as part of its World Cup “fan zone” offerings: free watch parties with giant screens, foosball tables and food trucks.
“Although we’re a small city, we have a big investment in arts and arts programming,” John Heilman, the city’s mayor, said. “It’s very exciting that we have this kind of global phenomenon occurring in West Hollywood.”
Unlike other “Discofoot” matches, which have been performed by dance companies, the U.S. premiere would bring together individual dancers. Jacobsson and Caley worried their Los Angeles troupe wouldn’t have time to jell, but were delighted by the “American mentality,” as Caley put it. The dancers were friendly; they were game. The group quickly bonded.
“It’s just the most fun project I’ve done in a very long time,” Baum said.
AT WEST HOLLYWOOD PARK, fans spun white and pink gym towels in the air that said “DISCO.” The players flirted with and yelled at the three judges: the consul general of France in Los Angeles, Adrien Frier; the City Council member John Erickson; and the West Hollywood “drag laureate,” Pickle.
Each revealed their scores for artistry. The pink team won, and leaped across the field. But not so fast! There would be a penalty shootout just for fun. A blue team member shot, she scored. Goooaaalll!
“It’s a tie!” Caley called out, to cheers from the crowd.
The dancers lined up to take a bow to the disco anthem “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).”
And then it was onto the next game: Belgium versus New Zealand on the big screen.
The post It’s Soccer, but Set to Disco. And May the Best Dancers Win. appeared first on New York Times.
