In September 2019 Avni Selimi converted the cult disco “Tenne” into “Invas Dance Club”.
© Andreas Rother
After the end of the cult disco “Tenne” there was a standstill. Only with the restart last autumn under the direction of Avni Selimi did life come back to the rooms at Kamener Straße 178 – now under the name “Invas Dance Club”. Since March, however, the music system in the club has been off due to Corona, and the dance floor is empty. Selimi reports how things have fared him so far and what problems he currently has as a discotheque operator.
Pelkum – “When we had to close, we wanted to take the opportunity to implement existing plans,” says the managing director. He confidently applied for one of the KfW support loans advertised by the government. Without success. “These loans must be applied for through the house bank, but there was a rejection,” says Selimi. A bureaucratic hurdle was too high: “We have only been on the market since September 2019 and therefore cannot include all the required figures that are required in the extremely small-scale loan applications,” explains the entrepreneur.
He and his partners had already changed a lot in the previous threshing floor and received a lot of praise from the audience: “Whether it was the new technology or the enlargement of the dance floor – the people were thrilled,” reports Selimi of the positive feedback.
Now a stage for live performances was to be created and the large bar was to be converted. But since the funding failed, the construction phase had to wait. The club stayed tight. Bitter: There were even rumors of bankruptcy when the discotheque didn’t reopen immediately at the end of the first lockdown. “But that’s nonsense,” says Selimi. Why did he keep the doors closed? “Despite the lockdown end, normal discotheque operations would not have been possible,” he says. The distance and mask requirement applied throughout.
Apparently everything is done right conceptually
In terms of concept, Invas Dance Club had apparently done everything right beforehand: Friday was still reserved for hits and the new range of dance courses was also very well received. Every 14 days there was a “Sunday dance” with coffee and cake from 3 to 8 pm, which was mainly attended by the older audience. “I was often amazed at what they were showing on the dance floor,” says Selimi. The new main pulling horse, however, were the theme parties that always take place on Saturdays: Whether “Russian Night”, “Polska Noc”, “Turkish Clubbing”, or “Black & Latina” – hip DJs and artists kept the house full until in the early morning.
“We worked together with organizers and supplemented the concepts sensibly,” says Selimi. In the separate smoking area outside, a burger bus provided good food and even an hourly shuttle bus to the main train station was planned for visitors. “Then came Corona,” says Selimi sadly. By the end of the year, he firmly assumes that it will be closed, what comes after that has to be seen first. “We had a complete event program up to 2022. But when the pandemic is over, we first have to see who is still doing what, ”said the managing director.
The landlord had done something to meet him, but politicians and the authorities still had to do more to support the entire event area. “It can’t be that people first say that help will be provided. But then whole industries fail because of the bureaucracy, ”says Selimi, who is critical of the payment hurdles for many companies. He says he doesn’t want anything for free. But he urgently needs to consider: If the lights go out for good, it will take a long time before normality is restored.
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