Perth Fringe: Big Boys Don’t Dance

Big Boys Don’t Dance is an original, engaging, funny and impressive dance piece that weaves a narrative through the performance introducing a range of various dance genres.

Brad and Ash (brothers in real life) have a problem. Ash’s soon to be father-in-law’s three hundred thousand rand car is stolen by a female stripper on the night of his bucks’ party.  Brad decides that one way of finding the money to replace the car is to enter the “So You Think You Can Strictly Come Dancing Competition” and immediately sets about convincing his brother to come out of retirement.

What follows is a hilarious tale as Ash tires to prepare for the his up coming nuptials while Brad pesters him to enter the competition.  Some of the funniest sequences are when they flashback to recount events from their lives. Brad’s recollection of his high school formal, in which he took a date that looked ‘a bit like a girl’, saw a well muscled Ash perform a Dirty Dancing sequence dressed in drag.  Another flashback involves the brothers getting ready to perform a striptease, only to be arrested for indecent exposure because the production was for children.

Original ideas are used to springboard into the dance segments including playing “Dance Revolution” on the X Box and comparing dance to karate and other manly sports.

There are many layers to this performance as the brothers explore such questions as: what men think about ‘the big wedding day’, why boys give up dance in their teenage years and what makes a real man.  All this is combined with a ‘history’ of dance through the ages.

The dancing is slick, energetic and at times explosive, while the narrative is funny and thought provoking.  Big boys can dance, it’s just that, as Brad says, “they don’t call it dance; they call it something like the Haka”.