Footloose

Five women wearing nothing but gold body makeup, briefs, pasties and high-heeled shoes huddle in the cold night air outside trailers that serve as dressing rooms for the Key Club on the Sunset Strip. No, they’re not strippers, models or New Age hookers, but dancers collectively portraying the droid C3PO in a wry rock-dance tribute to “Star Wars” staged Wednesday as part of the club’s monthly late-night “Carnival: A Choreographer’s Ball.”

Nearby, the piece’s co-choreographer, Napoleon D’Umo, tells a visitor that although he’s trying to sell a show full of such movie-inspired dances in the Las Vegas market, the impending performance is “just to have a good time” and celebrate the fifth anniversary of “Carnival,” which has become one of L.A.’s most vital showcases of new pop choreographers and dancers.

“You don’t have many places to show your work,” explains martial-arts champion Matt Mullins, warming up for an opening parody of Hong Kong fight extravaganzas in which he will execute state-of-the-art aerial feats. “This is a great place for artists to show what they can do and share new ideas.”

That’s what keeps the floor and balconies of the Key Club packed to capacity on “Carnival” nights: the chance to watch pop dance evolve, to discover who will take it to the next level. For industry professionals, it’s also an opportunity to learn how to keep projects in touch with a notoriously fickle audience.

And from here, the path can lead straight up. Brian Friedman started five years ago as a dancer in the first “Carnival” and says, “It put me out there and opened up job opportunities.” Eventually, he got into choreography, tried his ideas out at “Carnival” and now is choreographing his second Britney Spears show, with seven of her videos on his resume. “I see ‘Carnival’ as a way to express your creativity,” he says, “to show who you are, what you do, what you live for.”

Nobody gets paid, but as MTV star Wade Robson announces onstage in a break between pieces, “Life is too short to not do what you love.”

Twenty-three-year-old choreographer Khalid Freeman understands: This is his first “Carnival,” his chance to “get my ideas and free thought out, to rock it and show what my mind has got to say.”

As it happens, it says plenty: His streetwise male quintet “Molodi” is one of the night’s triumphs, fusing the kind of percussive stomping and body-slapping that comes out of African American cultural tradition with a rhythmic force and, in particular, a stylized use of the arms that looks utterly unprecedented.

Executive producer Carey Ysais started “Carnival” to free commercial choreographers and performers from the creative restrictions of working with a particular pre-assigned star, director or video script. He has presented about 220 choreographers, he says, and sees the trend right now “going toward pushing the boundaries of physical possibility in dance. I see dancers doing things that two years ago we would have thought were impossible.”

The Wednesday show offers plenty of examples, from the endless, amazing head-spins of an unbilled soloist named Phlipz in a piece by Robert James Hoffman III and Mihran, to a wildly unpredictable display of limb displacements by legendary veteran Poppin’ Pete, still on the edge after dancing in the Electric Boogaloos for more than a quarterof a century.

“Keep dance pure. Keep it real,” his colleague Skeeter Rabbit tells the crowd, but these priorities prove less in evidence on the 16-part program than the bursts of unbridled and sometimes experimental virtuosity and the usual overload of pieces that look all sexed up with no place to go.

Cati Jean’s sensual women’s trio displays maximum slickness, and Leslie Scott’s mock-pornographic ensemble piece maximum raunch, but in the realm of choreographed cupidity, there are no creative breakthroughs.

Well, there’s always next month, with a new “Carnival” lineup of dance-makers and performers and with Wednesday’s cast very likely out there in the crowd cheering them on.

“It’s a great event for dancers,” says Blake McGrath, a Britney Spears dancer who has also been seen locally in pieces by Terry Beeman. “It’s never the same people. They always give new choreographers a chance.”

For Sharon Ferguson, a performer and sometime emcee, “Carnival” represents “a unique scene in the dance community, a place where people feel part of a family -- and a wonderful playground for creative people.”