It won’t be happening on an ice rink or a ski hill, and there won’t be any medals. But the competition will reportedly get almost as fierce as at any other, official sporting event at the Games.

Dance Marathon, an interactive theatre event at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre this Tuesday through next Saturday (February 9 to 13), is a real contest set up with real rules. Audience members receive “pinnies” with a number to wear as they arrive, and are invited to take part in the lively four-hour endurance test set to the sounds of a live band and DJ. The main rule? You can’t stop moving. The results that play out, according to one of its cocreators, are nothing short of Darwinian.

“The unusual thing for us is to discover how competitive people are,” explains Stephen O’Connell, a core member of bluemouth inc., the Toronto-based collective that created the work, which is being brought here by Boca del Lupo and the Cultural Olympiad. He’s speaking from New York City, where he’s currently living with wife and company mate Lucy Simic. “We’ve found the longer people stay in the competition, the more they want to win the competition. In the arts community, people think we’re not competitive people. And it does not even matter what they win at the end! It could be a weekend for two at a resort on the Sunshine Coast or it could be a gift certificate to Burger King: it’s just about winning.

“It’s not fake. You get there, you compete, and there’s a winner at the end of the evening.”¦We do have a referee with a striped shirt and roller skates and he’s for real: if you stop moving, he blows the whistle and you’re out. The first person that’s picked will usually be just standing there laughing it off.” Until he or she gets the boot and has to do the walk of shame, that is. Then everyone takes things a bit more seriously.

Dance Marathon had its birth as a commission for Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre last year. Bluemouth inc. has done site-specific shows in a barbershop, a hotel room, a funeral parlour, and a former porno palace, and the group thrives on exploring the relationship between audience and performers. The members came upon the idea of the dance marathon, which had its heyday during the Great Depression, as a perfect way to engage viewers directly.

“Through our research, we started realizing that these dance marathons were highly corrupt. They became a circuit for out-of-work vaudeville actors. They would go from town to town and had these rigged contests,” O’Connell says, adding that the contests—which could last days or even weeks—were eventually banned in the late 1930s. “That’s where we got the idea of having these embedded performances and vaudeville-style shticks in the middle of our show.”

When Dance Marathon played in Toronto and at last year’s Cork Midsummer Festival in Ireland, O’Connell noticed how surprised participants were to discover, midway through the production, that certain people are actors or professional dancers. “The super-, super-interesting thing is the level of disbelief. I’ll be dancing with an audience member, I’ll get up and do a monologue, and I’ll go back to them, and they still think I’m an audience member! The whole thing sort of feels like you’re in a movie.”