See you in 2027!

Cabaret Ball – By Andrew Sutherland

 

The glamour of the Romanov dynasty, including boot scooting and a plus size demonstration of the burlesque arts, was evoked unexpectedly and energetically and without apology at the Buninyong Town Hall on Saturday night in the inaugural Cabaret Ball, marking the launch of this year’s Ballarat Cabaret Festival.

 

Two days later and I’m still dumbstruck by the event. There was waltzing, line dancing, some mysterious and regal Pakistani folk dancing. There was Argentinian tango. There were raunchy shielas from Adelaide, wearing corsets and moving like the Moulin Rouge was Play School. The entire package gobsmackingly charming, glittery and grand.

 

You might have had this experience, I know I did, when you were in primary school, and you got taught how to dance. Two circles, one within the other, rotated gradually like the mechanism in a clock. It was the first time you might have touched the hand of a girl or a boy that was not a sibling, a ritual of organized movement that creaked from awkwardness to adequacy, on to a glimpse of a long ago era, of manners and motion, approaching a glimmer of selflessness that the body remembers even as the mind forgets.

 

This event was like that. It was eminently interactive and inclusive, each phase structured first as a demonstration, and then an invitation to join in, part workshop, part taster. There was a genuine genius to the juxtapositions of dance genres: from ballroom dancing we segued to boot scooting, and then on to an exquisite evocation of South Asian folk dancing. The kindness of the host performers was subtle yet sophisticated. How else to explain the rhythm and grace that ensnared and transported the 60 odd gold town village people, suddenly moving as one?

 

An enduring image of the evening is of this cat from Mount Egerton, some real rural bloke, plucking imaginary flowers, his wrists effecting alignment to Bollywood like gestures, beckoning, lifting water, raising his arms to call down rain. He probably wasn’t expecting this when he was milking his goat that morning. Plus we got 19 mm of rain later that night. Fact!

 

As the host and Festival coordinator, Issie Hart, explained, it’s better to dance than to be enslaved by your device and lonesome, and it’s better to be together than not. Events like this can cause lasting benefit to the DNA of a community. It’s nice to know you can still get together with a room full of strangers and have a ball.

 

The Ballarat Cabaret Festival rolls on this week and the next, on into May 31, graduating from the foothills of Mount Buninyong to the big smoke of Ballarat. Get some glamour in you while you can. You deserve it!