- By Kaylia Payne

Hey you. Yes, you. Dancing in the corner, thinking that you’re oh so cool. Bright lights flashing, music pounding, body shaking and undulating. You should be ashamed of yourself. You are breaking the stringent rules of dance.

Have you even offered your palm face-up to the partner you’re currently gyrating against? Have you even offered your palm?! Shame on you.

Luckily for you, the group behind ‘Don’ts For Dancers’ don’t mind. In fact, they’re quite the rules breakers themselves. I would go so far as to say that they went out of their way to break every single rule in the book.

And by book, I mean a literal book. The text ‘Don’ts for Dancers’ is a look at the social etiquette of dance in the 1920s, including advice such as, “Don’t dance with bent knees. Bent knees suggest an ancient cab-horse on its last pathetic stagger or a performing chimpanzee gyrating around its keeper”. It is both informative and hilarious. Nerida Matthael and Nicole Canham saw it the same way, and so the production ‘Don’ts for Dancers’ was born.

It began with a literal interpretation of the text, with a dancer pulling an audience member out for a demonstration. “Don’t speak; don’t stretch out your left arm like a pump handle,” she snapped and scolded, pulling him around the room and throwing him into the strangest positions, leaving us in stitches. “This is so fun!”, my friend whispered to me. And she was right. It was fun. In fact, that one syllable sums up the entire show perfectly.

It wasn’t trying to wow us with how deep it was. It wasn’t trying to shove a message down our throats under the guise of pretty costumes and amazing legs. It wasn’t trying to get us to re-evaluate our lives and change our perspective of the world.

Instead it just was. And everyone had a great time.

The dancers had loads of talent, great comedic timing, and there was plenty of audience interaction – including pulling people out of their seats to dance with them during intermission. That was both a positive and a negative for me. I was terrified of being pulled out the crowd myself, and I can imagine other socially awkward people would have felt the same. But seeing other people take part definitely added to the enjoyment of the production.

All in all, it was the perfect ending to my small part in the You Are Here festival (which involved judging other people’s work in lieu of doing any of my own). A lot of events I have seen were trying too hard to show how artistic they are, resulting in a pretentious atmosphere that detracted from the event and artists involved.

Sometimes you just need to turn the music up, put on your dancing shoes, and simply have fun.