Art Crowd Gets Heated at Armory Dance PartyIt’s hard to have a throwdown in skinny jeans, but on Saturday night at the Whitney Biennial’s 24-hour dance party at the Armory, it happened: The hipsters went wild. The event, the culmination of Agathe Snow’s 96-hour marathon of continuous dance, was cut seven hours short of the goal when, around 4 a.m., a fight erupted mid–dance floor. At first, onlookers thought the scuffle — which began with just handful of fighters and swelled to more than twenty — was an ironic piece of performance art. “I thought they were kidding,” said Eden Mackenzie, a video editor who was on the dance floor when the fists began to fly. “Then they all just started jumping on one guy and punching him as he lay on the ground.”
Doreen Remen, co-founder of the Art Production Fund and one of the event’s producers played down the tussle to New York: “It was just two guys, and they were asked to leave,” she said. “It all happened very fast.” But Obinna Izeogu, an art director who attended the party described the scene as a “mini-riot,” in which blows were traded for more than fifteen minutes as more partygoers joined in the fray that continued to swell even after D.J.’s killed the tunes (and Snow’s vision of infinite dance). “It started off like two and then it just became a rumble,” said Izeogu. Armory security staff, unprompted, dialed 911 for reinforcements, and officers who responded called it “that gigantic fight”.
