Go-Go Dancing

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Go-go dancing happens on stage in live concerts, too.

Go-Go Dancing is Exactly What It Says on the Tin - dancing energetically on one's own, often but not always professionally, at a bar or nightclub for the entertainment of the patrons. While the outfits that go-go dancers wear are usually minimal to the point of being stripperiffic (and occasionally the dancers go topless, as at least one famously did at San Francisco's Condor Club in the 1960s), the dancers do not as a rule actually strip - go-go bars are not strip clubs.

The Other Wiki has an article about the history of go-go dancing, including a mention that as of 1991 there were more go-go boys in gay clubs than there were go-go girls in "straight" clubs.

Note that at least on American TV in the 1960s and early 1970s, "go-go dancer" could (and did) serve as a censor-friendly synonym for "stripper".

Compare the Bikini Bar and Strip Clubs.

Not to be confused with The Go-Go's, Go Go Tomago, Go-go Yubari, Hugo A-Go-Go or Go Go Gadget Anything. Or with the subgenre of Funk music that arose out of Washington DC in the 1960s-70s.

Go-Go Dancing is the Trope Namer for:
Examples of Go-Go Dancing include:

Film

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

  • Pizzicato Five has a song titled "Go Go Dancer", sung from the perspective of a go-go girl from the 1960s or 1970s.
  • The video for Caravan Place's "Lone Digger" features a lone gazelle go go dancer in a bar populated by different anthropomorphized animals. She keeps dancing imperturbably when the other animals begin to attack and kill each other, and, in the end, she is the only survivor of the massacre.

Video Games

  • No One Lives Forever has a go-go lounge populated by a multiracial trio of go-go girls who are actually a Quirky Miniboss Squad with sniper rifles. Before you encountered them, they lounged around their dressing room moaning about how so very bored they were.

Web Original

  • Dr. Steel's live stage shows frequently featured go-go dancers dressed in PVC halters and miniskirts that matched his labcoat.

Western Animation

  1. Played by Leslie Parrish, better known as Lt. Carolyn Palamas from the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Who Mourns For Adonais?"