With a disco ball in hand: 12 hours to dismantle the master’s house – The Ignorant Art School’s Sit-in #4: 12 Hour Acting Up

Inside the 12 Hour Acting Up’s handout sits the picture of Audre Lorde, with a big smile, paddling on Krumme Lake in Berlin. She wears a red t-shirt with the quote ‘If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution’. This line is sometimes (as is the case again now) attributed to Emma Goldman, but Goldman never wrote or said this exact phrase. Instead, it was paraphrased by printer Jack Frager, and it took on a life of its own. Most likely it came from the following situation that Goldman describes in her 1931 autobiography:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance... I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. [1]