PROVIDENCE — At the E&O Tap, a hipster hangout in the city’s West End, the women of the Co-ed Fight Club for Girls were battling it out to see who was the strongest female in the room.

A crowd gathered around two women arm wrestling at a table, shrieking as the winner’s heavily tattooed arm slammed the loser’s to the wooden tabletop. Cecily Dubusker stood on a bench above them in red short-shorts and a tank top, bouncing up and down with 10-pound dumbbells in hand like a bodybuilding go-go dancer. On a wall screen, grainy videos of wrestling legend Andre the Giant ran on repeat, while three other women, in leotards, spandex and multicolored sweatbands, tended bar on the chilly Monday night.

At ground level, Rebecca Zuck tried to explain the appeal of the Co-ed Fight Club for Girls over the beats of Salt ‘N’ Pepa’s pulsing hip-hop anthem “Push It.”

“It’s my favorite two days of the week, honestly, coming to fight club. It’s the fact that we’re all super supportive of each other, it’s not some catty gym. We’re all sort of ridiculous, so every time it’s like, ‘wow, look at your outfit,’ ” Zuck said.

“I would have never been able to work out like this in a gym. Ever,” she said.

As the song ended, Dubusker dropped her weights, leaped off the bench and ran over to Zuck, standing by the Family Guy pinball machine.

“Want to see me carry a 250-pound man on my back?” she shouted, hoisting up a burly, bearded man piggyback style and challenging another woman to do the same.

The women spilled out into the street to watch the race.

DESPITE ITS NAME — the result of an offhand moment of inspiration by one of Dubusker’s friends — the club is not co-ed, and there is no fighting. It’s a hybrid workout club and performance art piece, intentionally macho and campy, and quickly taking its place in the pantheon of local indie “girl power” events, alongside Providence’s all-female Roller Derby and the city’s co-ed kickball league.

These are not the women you would find at Gold’s Gym, or Curves or Healthtrax. They say they dislike gym culture, find it exclusionary, or intimidating, or, like Zuck, “catty.” Many are the artists who populate Providence’s post-RISD West Side scene — some who started drifting away from exercise as far back as high school, when some gravitate to the world of art and some to the world of sports, when the two can be mutually exclusive.

As they aged into their late 20s and early 30s, they realized they wanted to work out — but there was no gym that catered to the tattoos-and-piercings set.

Out of that void came the Co-Ed Fight Club for Girls, and its rotation of 20 to 25 Providence women, billing itself as a “Curves for the post-irony crowd.” At the head of the Monday and Thursday workouts is Dubusker, who plays the role of drill sergeant, but in a gold lamé bodysuit and leg warmers. During the daytime she is an assistant tennis coach for the Brown University tennis team, and most of the fight club workouts are derived from tennis training routines.

“It was one way to get my artist friends who wanted to work out but didn’t fit into the traditional mold, into it,” Dubusker said.

The club started in Dubusker’s Broadway apartment in the fall of 2006. It was little more than a growing group of friends working out together until they brought graphic designer and painter Josie Morway into the fold, and moved the workouts to her Washington Street garage-cum-artist studio. In theory the club is open to anyone, but most of the women are active in Providence’s art scene.

“It’s not hard to get people interested. I think it could really be a big thing. There’s so many women who want to do a really hard-core workout, but not some lame thing. … They don’t want to do it alone. We listen to awesome music, we go out and have a drink afterward, we wear cool outfits — it’s not hard to get people involved in that,” said Morway, 32, also a RISD grad.

The transition from workout club to performance art piece came soon after, and somewhat haphazardly. The group needed to raise money for weights, and members knew the owner at E&O Tap. They figured they could make some money guest bartending and also create a spectacle. On a Monday night in January, 200 people reportedly showed up to pack the Knight Street bar.

“Our first bartending night was a little crazy. I weightlifted in the corner for four hours,” Dubusker said. They returned for a second guest stint at the end of February, billing it as the “strongest girl in the room” competition, though no real winner was actually crowned.

The club now has a raunchy MySpace page filled with pictures of female bodybuilders, and recently commissioned “uniforms” by a friend at arts collaborative AS220: tank tops emblazoned with a comically muscular strongwoman.

ON A THURSDAY night early this month in Morway’s garage, Dubusker shouted commands at the 10 women in front of her, all looking like extras from an early 1980s Richard Simmons workout video. Dubusker upped the ante by putting on a tiger face mask for one exercise, in which the group swung bowling pins to tone the shoulders and upper back. “Keep your form, just a few more seconds,” Dubusker yelled at them as they did jackknives, an abdominal exercise.

The workouts are serious, and those who come expecting a cake walk are often surprised to be doing exercises familiar to powerlifters, with a heavy focus on squats and abs work.

Maureen Kevaney, 27, a photographer and 2007 RISD grad school graduate who works at a Woonsocket after-school program, is rare in the group in that she was a varsity athlete in high school, but she said the workouts are intense enough to leave her perpetually sore.

“It’s killer. My body is so different from just two months of doing it,” she said.

Kevaney joined the group several months ago after hearing about it through a friend, and embraced the fight club’s over-the-top antics immediately. She was an instant hit because of her extensive throwback wardrobe.

“I have a collection of leg warmers from my past. Tie-dyed leotards from when I was 14. And they just eat it up,” she laughed.

It’s easier for these strangers to feel comfortable working out as a group, she mused, because there’s a conscious effort to mock the female workout culture — even as they participate in it.

“We get to work out, but we also get to joke about the whole workout culture,” she said. “Everything that surrounds workout culture is kind of funny to us, so we kind of play it up, and have fun with it.”

At the same time, fight club wouldn’t have its pseudo-macho legitimacy if the workouts weren’t grueling, and Dubusker herself is a bargain as a nearly free workout instructor, Kevaney said.

Dubusker has periodically asked for small donations to buy more equipment for the group, but lately the bartending nights have brought them hundreds of dollars, and their ambitions have turned to making the group’s performance element grow.

“A lot of us are really poor, honestly. We’re artists or we’re struggling some way, so we get to go somewhere two times a week and work out for nothing,” she said.

FIGHT CLUB walks a fine line between workout and performance art. Some members come strictly for the exercise, and want nothing to do with the bartending nights or the jello shots. Others are drawn by the more flamboyant aspects, and would like to see the performance end amped up, and fight club become a regular participant in the Providence scene.

Dubusker herself is unsure of exactly where to go with the club. But she loves the more public elements.

“The more people we get, the more performative it can get. And we can look into things like signing on a choreographer,” Dubusker mused.

Dubusker is also considering having the group perform as tongue-in-cheek cheerleaders at this summer’s Providence Kickball League games.

The group appears to be embracing its performance. Over two nights recently, the group filmed its own music video, a take on the risqué aerobic-themed video to DJ Eric Prydz’ single “Call on me.” As with all things they do, it’s satire, but serious at the same time.

“We tried to make the moves as parallel as possible. Some of them we can’t really do. But we tried to do the faces [the dancers make] as well as we could,” Dubusker said.

They filmed the video on the squash courts at Brown. They’re hoping to unveil it at their next bartending night.

“With a lot of these things, the line is kind of blurry between where us joking around ends and us being serious begins. And that’s kind of consistent with the way we all live our lives,” Dubusker said.

dbarbari@projo.com