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.

- By Kaylia Payne

I have a confession.  This morning I woke up in a cold sweat when I remembered that I was reviewing the first day of the Paste-Up Project, a You Are Here festival event that involves turning the outside wall of the Canberra Museum and Gallery (CMAG) into an open-air gallery.  I considered not going at all.  This is because visual art terrifies me; I don’t get it at all, and how can I review something that I don’t understand?

I knew, without a doubt, I was walking into the event with a strong prejudice against it, which doesn’t make for a fair and impartial review. Writing about something I don’t particularly care for seemed dishonest somehow.

But I decided that today was time for a change. It was time to open up my mind and heart to visual art in all of its forms, and so I headed over to CMAG with my prejudices left behind and surveyed the artistic wonder creative Canberrans had put on display…

…and I was not impressed.

The work just didn’t ‘pop’. Colours weren’t dancing off the wall, fighting for the attention of all those who passed them. I was hoping for something that would stop people on their boring walk or drive to work and get them, if only for a few minutes, to really see the world around them.

That’s not to say that there weren’t some cool pieces – I especially liked the Wonderland-esque people with native birds and animals for heads. There was another piece as well; I’m not sure exactly what it was (being abstract and all), but it was eye-catching.

And as a concept, I quite liked the Paste-Up Project. It was as if the artists were turning the wall of the CMAG into our own little East Side Gallery, only without all the, like, history, and you know, boring stuff like that. (Random fun fact on that topic: the Harmonie German Club in Canberra has the biggest piece of the Berlin wall in the Southern Hemisphere).

But visually I just wasn’t overwhelmed.

So would I recommend going? Surprisingly, I would have to say yes. It livens up an otherwise dull part of the city, it’s easy to get to, and, as much as it bothers me, people have different opinions to mine (I know this for a fact, since Ulysses still sells and every copy of Eraserhead hasn’t been burned into a giant plastic lump), so you might just love it.

The Paste-Up Project is running until March 18^th, so if you want a small taste of art, you can head on over to the Canberra Museum and Gallery, London Circuit, to check it out for yourself.

What is better than spending an evening spent curled up in a cosy bookstore eating cheese and drinking wine? Spending an evening curled up in a cosy bookstore eating cheese and drinking wine while people read to you.

That is exactly what You Are Here had on offer Thursday night at Smith’s Alternative Bookshop. Forget having to waste precious energy picking up a book off the shelf, then having to abuse your poor wasted arm muscles by turning the pages, and THEN having to strain your poor short-sighted eyes to decipher the strange symbols on the page:  You Are Here saved the day by getting some poor unlucky souls to do all of the work for us.

Scissors, Paper, Pen, lip magazine, and new literary journal, Burley, were asked to pick their favourite local writers to give us a taste of their work, and they did not disappoint. The evening began with host Rosie Stevens serenading us with a theme song for the night, to the delight and laughter of the crowd, and it only got better from there.

First up was Irma Gold, who read us an excerpt from her book, Two Steps Forward. The language captivated the audience from the start: lines such as ‘comfortable silence that settles over them like milky skin’ drew the audience in and painted the colours of her story all over the room.

Next up Anita Patel read us a selection of her poetry. The first two poems stood up and grabbed the audience; ‘Chinese Bowl in a Summer Dress’ and ‘Aunties’ were about feeling the pull of two cultures, which she covered in both a humorous and moving way.

Ashley Orr then moseyed on up to read us one of her short stories. It took the audience a little while to get into it, mainly due to her quiet reading style, but by the end every person in the room was hooked. A cleverly written story about a peacock that teaches an old man to read? How could you not be?

The article ‘Leggings and Pants Are Not the Devil’, written and read by the editor of lip magazine, Zoya Patel, was next. If the title didn’t catch you, the reading of it certainly did, and the audience ate it up like McDonald’s chips after a few too many, erm, beverages.

But the highlight of the show was open-mic poet Zoe Konovolovic. It was less a reading and more an insane performance. The good kind of insane. The old man in your street who throws one hundred dollar bills your way kind of insane.

While Canberra’s artistic side often tends to be hidden from view, that night it was obvious that the capital has plenty to offer. And judging from the fantastic crowd that rocked up Thursday, plenty of fellow Canberrans will be there to support it every step of the way.

Photo by Adam Thomas