Anne Aly will take part in a 25-hour dance marathon at Edith Cowan University in Perth in an attempt to set a world record for the longest continuous dance party.
The Labor MP has requested R&B for her moves while vice-chancellor Steve Chapman has been studying Gangnam Style clips on YouTube and is getting a white suit ready.
The event is being held as part of the university’s 25th anniversary celebrations and aims to beat the previous record of 24 hours and 9 minutes set by MTV’s 24-hour Beyonce-themed party in 2015.
Aly attended the university as a student and returned later as a professor, before being elected to the Australian parliament in July. She remains on the staff as an adjunct professor.
She headed to the stage at the Joondalup campus immediately after getting off her flight from Canberra, following the final parliamentary sitting week of the year.
The university is named after Edith Cowan, who became the first woman elected to any Australian parliament when she was voted into the lower house in Western Australia in 1920.
She could not have suspected that another political pioneer, the first Muslim woman elected to the Australian parliament, would one day dance to Usher in her name.
Labor's Anne Aly repping some straight up gangsta moves in Australian Parliament #auspol pic.twitter.com/wxHGoWnZ96
— Alice Workman (@workmanalice) September 13, 2016
Chapman said they had worked out a roster of students, staff and special guests, including Aly and some members of the Perth Wildcats basketball team, to ensure there was more than one person dancing the whole time.
The dance started at 12pm on Friday and was expected to balloon to several hundred people about mid-afternoon, before winnowing down to a tired but determined few in the early hours of the morning.
“You don’t want to get down to one person because then if they stop dancing, there’s a problem,” Chapman said.
He will not be sharing the dance floor with Aly because of her R&B request –Chapman’s repertoire is limited to Gangnam Style.
“I am a kind of dad dancer so free form would make me look pretty bad, I think, whereas with Gangnam Style there are certain moves that you have to do – riding the horse, whipping the horse, etc,” Chapman told Guardian Australia. “If you have to make up the moves, you can look like a dad dancer.”
Chapman insisted he would be the star of the show. But, in what appeared to be an open challenge to any student with a camera phone, he said he had taken steps to ensure his rehearsed footwork was not captured on film
“I don’t want to do the first dance because I don’t really want people to film it,” he said.
He later added: “I’m just looking at the stage and they are trying out the smoke. Hopefully when I dance they can pump out a lot of smoke and hide what I am doing – I think I’ll request that.”
