Midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show have been passing the song from city to city since Tuesday and cannot stop.
Tribute screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show have been passing the Time Warp from city to city since Tuesday without a break. Organisers say the choreography sheet loops back to the start and has no closing step. Nobody wants to be the person who writes one.
The Time Warp has now been dancing continuously since Tuesday night, and the people running it say there is no way to bring it to a close.
It began as three separate tribute screenings held for Tim Curry, who died at 80 at his home in Los Angeles. It has not paused since.
Cinemas have been handing the song westward as the planet turns. When one auditorium empties, the next one is already up on its feet.
"We did not plan a relay. The relay happened to us," said Marguerite Delacroix-Pell of the International Midnight Screening Alliance. "Los Angeles passed it to Honolulu, Honolulu passed it to Auckland, and now nobody wants to be the venue that drops it."
The step that isn't there
Curry made his name as Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show, then spent decades refusing to be only that. He was the devil in Legend, Wadsworth in Clue, and Pennywise in Stephen King's It.
The Time Warp came with him, and so did its instructions, printed on a sheet that audiences have followed for half a century.
Here is the problem. Sources close to the choreography say the sheet has no final step. It ends by sending the dancer back to the beginning.
"There is a jump to the left, there is a step to the right, and then there is a return," said Dr Priya Raghunathan of the Institute for Continuous Movement. "Structurally it is a loop. It was always a loop. For fifty years everyone simply chose to walk out mid-loop, and this week nobody did."
She described the situation as the first documented case of a dance outliving its own screening.
"We are not trapped in the Time Warp. The Time Warp is simply still going, and we happen to be inside it."
Rotas, ushers and one very tired projectionist
Cinema managers have moved to three-hour shifts. Staff dance for one shift, sleep for two, and come back to relieve whoever is still going.
Barnaby Tusk, an archivist who has kept records for shadow casts since the 1980s, says the paperwork alone is unprecedented.
"I have logged three thousand screenings in my life and every one of them ended," he said. "This one has no end column. I have had to add a column."
Insiders describe scenes of quiet crisis in the projection box. One projectionist reportedly tried to bring the house lights up on Wednesday morning and found the crowd simply carried on in the dark.
Sources close to the situation insist the lights were not the issue. The issue, they say, was that the pelvic thrust really does drive you insane, and always did, and the sheet warned everyone about that in writing.
Callbacks suspended out of respect
The alliance has asked audiences to hold the shouted callback lines for the duration. In their place, each auditorium takes three seconds of silence before the chorus.
"Three seconds, then straight back into it," said Delacroix-Pell. "He would have hated a minute. A minute is a eulogy. Three seconds is a beat."
Not everyone is coping. A ferry terminal in one coastal town reported that a returning audience began the dance again on the concourse while waiting for the last boat, which nobody had authorised.
Rice throwing has been paused entirely. Cleaning staff described the accumulation as the one part of the situation that could still be solved.
What happens now
Nobody has a plan. Raghunathan says the only known way to close a loop is to write a new final step, and no living choreographer wants that credit.
"You would be the person who ended it," she said. "That is on your headstone. Nobody is signing up for that."
Tusk has a different theory, which he offered while holding a mug and standing in a foyer at four in the morning.
"It was never our dance to stop," he said. "He handed it over in 1975 and left the instructions circular on purpose. That is not an accident. That is a man who understood the assignment."
The relay is currently somewhere over the Atlantic, in the sense that three cinemas on two continents are both claiming it. Curry, who spent a career being both the most theatrical person in the room and the most precise, is not available to arbitrate.
The alliance says the song will be handed on again at midnight, as it has been every night since Tuesday. There is no scheduled finish. That, everyone involved agrees, is the entire point.
