Growing up in Brisbane, Bryony Walters asked her mum if she could do ballet. “She just straight up said, ‘You’re too fat for a leotard’,” she recalls. “I know that’s a reflection of her relationship with her own body, but that kind of thing had me pretty fucked up for a pretty long time around body and food.”
It also affected her relationship with exercise, and movement in general. “It always seemed like a punishment that I was inflicting upon myself,” Walters, now in her late 30s, tells the Guardian. “It wasn’t a thing you were engaging with to have fun or to feel good.”
But when she saw a post in her community Facebook group about dance classes for a DIY eisteddfod, Bryony’s curiosity was piqued. “It was [this woman] saying ‘I auditioned for the Rock Eisteddfod in high school and I got rejected, and I’ve never let that go – and so I’m starting my own’,” she recalls.
The woman was Neridah Waters – and her Facebook post set off the amateur dance revolution known as Common People Dance Eisteddfod. Now in its seventh year, the project invites people of all ages, abilities and bodies to dance together – to 80s and 90s music, while wearing leotards, sequins, sparkles and glitter – culminating in a dance-off as part of the Brisbane festival, which opens this year on Friday 5 September.
Waters, a stalwart of Brisbane’s alt cabaret scene, describes the project as a mix between Young Talent Time, sports carnivals, 80s gameshow It’s A Knockout – and, of course, the Australian Rock Eisteddfod Challenge: a nation-wide high school competition that was popular in the 80s and 90s.
Bryony, who has performed in five Common People Dance Eisteddfods, says it’s a “rare and special” opportunity to “engage in really joyful movement in circumstances where the concern isn’t how you look”.
Amanda Dell, another one of the inaugural “class of 2019” participants, calls it “dickhead dancing”.
“What we’re aiming for is to just get up there and be silly and leave it all on the stage.”
Like Bryony, Amanda came to Common People with an unfulfilled childhood dream of dancing. This year, she is dancing for Southside, one of seven teams of between 30 and 65 people competing in the eisteddfod, each performing their own routine of around five minutes – featuring moves with names like Jazz on Ya Face, Chicken Chicken Pelvis and Aunty Pat’s Christmas Trifle.
Waters, who came up with the idea for the eisteddfod during a middle-of-the-night burst of inspiration, had no idea it would snowball into an annual juggernaut attracting hundreds of participants. Back in 2019, she was experiencing a lull in her career after becoming a mother. She’d been teaching community dance classes that were attracting middle-aged men and shy people who “wanted me to teach them seriously, from scratch, how to dance,” she says.
“I wanted to do something more theatrical. I wanted participants who were as silly [as me].”
As soon as she posted her alternative rock eisteddfod idea “it went nuts”, she says. “People understood immediately the sense of humour behind it.”
Starting off in her local community hall, the project spiralled into classes and teams in different suburbs. Brisbane festival came on board to host the eisteddfod as part of their program, and before the inaugural event the dancers of each team marched through the streets of South Bank to converge in a dance battle outside the festival’s Spiegeltent – set to Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger.
Amanda, who was part of the march – wearing a leotard for the first time, not to mention in public – remembers it being nerve-racking.“The way that women think about their bodies, that’s a big thing to do,” she says. “But you’ve got the power of the group. And that day is one of the best days of my life – it was just such joy and excitement.”
Putting on the costume and the makeup empowers people – giving them permission to unleash, Waters says. “We had women who were size 20 or 24 in leotards who looked like superhero versions of their suburban selves … strutting down their street with their hair sprayed as high as a six-inch sub, just owning it,” she recalls. “I saw this school principal – there was a sandwich board outside a cafe and she just kicked it down the street.”
From the get-go, Common People Dance Eisteddfod has predominantly attracted middle-aged women. (One year, a team did an interpretive dance on the theme of “the symptoms of perimenopause in a subtropical climate that’s going through climate change”.) Some are former dancers looking to let their hair down, most are amateurs or people who have never danced. Whatever their reasons for coming, they stay for the sense of community, the confidence boost – and the endorphins.
Amanda, who describes the last few years of her personal life as “a shocker”, rarely misses a class. “I know that no matter how I’m feeling beforehand, I will feel better afterwards,” she says. “Having people that you meet with regularly, who you can rely on for that emotional support and friendship and fun – those things are invaluable.”
For some, the eisteddfod is life-changing. Waters tells me about Zak, a shy teenage boy who slowly came out of his shell doing Common People’s living-room dance parties during lockdown. When IRL classes resumed, Waters encouraged him to take more of a leading role – culminating in him dancing and lip-syncing to a packed house for the eisteddfod.
A couple of months later, Zak decided he wanted to run for school captain. “His mum said ‘Are you sure?’, and he said, ‘Mum, look, I stood in front of 1,500 people and did the dance battle. I can do anything now’,” Waters says. “And so he did it – and he ended up becoming school captain.”
Other transformations are more gentle. “I think for me, principally, it was about finding a greater sort of hopefulness around the possibility of finding community and getting to continue to be silly as I age,” Bryony says.
“Sometimes it feels like it’s not an arts project at all,” Waters confesses. “It’s a mental health project, dressed up in an arts project – wrapped in a leotard.”
Common People Dance Eisteddfod takes place on Sunday 7 September as part of the Brisbane festival.
