Dance, dance wherever you may be ...

I accepted an invitation to attend a performance by the Shun Yen Performing Arts dance group.  I really should pay more attention to detail.  Spike and I turned up at Sydney's Capitol Theatre (with its surreal decaying sea world / Midsummer Night's Dream interior) not knowing what to expect other than it would Chinese, classical and there would be dance.  Well, yeh but not quite.

It turns that we were attending a Falun Gong vaudeville show.  It may not be a cult but it is hard not to imagine that some kind of invasion of the body-snatchers thing happened to a town-full of ordinary Chinese people from the 1950s.  It's as if they're in a perpetual world tour of happy-clappy, post-Mao, pre-Millennialist rapture . The audience look intently at outsiders like me, compassion represented by the fixed, sorrowful smile of forbearance on their tolerant faces.  On stage there's the creepiest male host you could imagine in an evening suit and bow tie from a 1950s Moss Bros. Store.  His American twang reeks of everything scary about B-movie characters whom one knows have already had their brains sucked out by the thing from planet B.  His Chinese sidekick, a woman with a plastic tiara who claps her hands like a Disney character from snow white, lead us from one dance to the next.  It's ghastly.

The dancers and the dances are, it has to be said, sweet.  It's as if a troupe of local amateurs had escaped from one of those early Judy Garland / Mickey Rooney musicals from the 1940s.  "Let's do the show right here" they cry ... and off they go: spinning, tumbling, synchronised swimming without water.  It's colourful, it might even be Chinese but when the curtain came down for the final time we were out of there like proverbial bat out of Hell.