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A two-month business suspension imposed on an indie live club in Busan — because audience members stood up and moved to the music during a performance — has drawn the attention of lawmakers. A "no dancing" rule created to stop entertainment establishments from operating under improper licenses is being applied to small performance venues in the same way.
Two-Month Suspension for Dancing at a Show. What Happened
Rep. Park Soo-young of the People Power Party introduced a bill on the 9th to revise the Performance Act, dubbed the "Obavantgarde Incident Prevention Act," according to political sources on the 12th.
The dispute began at Obavantgarde, an indie live club in Daeyeon-dong, Nam-gu, Busan. Opened in 2018 and located between Kyungsung University and Pukyong National University, the venue has been called a sacred site for local indie performances.
The problem was the audience's dancing. Obavantgarde is registered as a general restaurant that sells food and alcohol, and it received a two-month business suspension starting on the 26th of last month after some audience members danced, swaying to the music during a show.
Under the current enforcement rules of the Food Sanitation Act, operators of general restaurants that have sound equipment may not allow customers to dance. The rule was designed to prevent businesses from registering as general restaurants and then operating as clubs or gamseong jujeom, pubs where patrons are allowed to dance.
Critics in the performance industry argued that treating audience members standing up, moving and cheering at rock or indie shows the same as dancing at entertainment establishments does not match reality.
Culture, Sports and Tourism Minister Choi Hwi-young also signaled changes to the rules, writing on social media on the 31st of last month that dancing in response to music is not a crime and that he would break down outdated regulations.
Restaurant or Entertainment Bar? Live Clubs Fall Into a Regulatory Gap
At the heart of the dispute is a business classification system that fails to account for live clubs. Small live clubs operate around performances while also selling food and alcohol, but with no separate category available, many register and operate as general restaurants.
Registering as an entertainment bar would allow performances and dancing along with alcohol sales, but the burden grows. Unlike general restaurants, such businesses pay an individual consumption tax equal to 10% of food charges, plus an education tax equal to 30% of that amount. Entry is also barred for those under 19.
Registering as an official performance venue under the Performance Act is not easy either. Recognition as a performance venue requires performances on at least 90 days a year or 30 consecutive days, a threshold that small live clubs holding shows mainly on weekends or specific days of the week find hard to meet, according to the industry.
Standards also vary by region. Some local governments, including Seoul's Mapo-gu, allow customers to dance in seating areas of general restaurants through local ordinances, but that is not a standard applied nationwide.
It Reached the National Assembly. Recognizing "Small Performance Facilities" Separately
The core of the Performance Act revision Park introduced on the 9th is to let facilities below a certain size register as "small performance facilities" and to recognize them as performance venues under the act. It would also set separate operating standards reflecting the sale of food and alcohol alongside performances, distinguishing such venues from entertainment establishments.
"The current system effectively treats small performance facilities within a dichotomy of either general restaurants or entertainment establishments," Park said. "A gap has opened between performance venues and the rules, with natural audience responses and movements during shows judged to be dancing and leading to business suspensions."
Calls for change also came from the opposition. Nam Myung-sook, a Busan city council member from the Democratic Party of Korea, said on the same day that playing music for a performance and having audience members clap, cheer and rise from their seats while listening is a natural part of performance culture, and that regulating this uniformly because a venue is a general restaurant does not match reality.
Other countries already regulate based on the form of business rather than dancing itself. Britain does not require a separate entertainment license for live music performances for audiences of 500 or fewer that meet certain conditions, and Japan revised its law in 2015 to remove "businesses that let customers dance" as an independent regulatory category.
