Dancing in the Street
Jess Miller & Claire Sutton

Because let’s face it - for the foreseeable future there’s nowhere else to do it.

There is nothing better for the soul that dancing. I don’t even need to find the proof, because this is a fact that everyone with two legs and a heartbeat just knows.

No-one knows how to dance in the street better than the Brazilians, who have purpose-built sambadromes in their cities where throughout February street dancing parties called ‘quadrillas’ dominate the neighbourhood soundscape as the community is taught that year’s song and dance by the local Samba School.

The only thing that even resembles this in Sydney (apart from bits of Parramasala) is the annual Mardi Gras parade, whose public space ‘heart chakra’ is Taylor Square. Now everyone has an idea for Oxford Street, but this one is so obvious it would be criminal not to do it.

Give Gilligan’s Island a ‘shave’, transform it into a catwalk and install Bluetooth speakers.

Thus creating the perfect outdoor ‘voguing’ space, performance space, dance battlespace. Program with some DJs either remotely or in-situ via volume-controlled speakers embedded into the public realm and you got yourself a dance floor.

Have another look – it’s a blindingly obvious light touch, but as transformative as body glitter on a beer belly.

Give our LGBTQI community young and old a bold invitation to unashamedly be themselves in a public space sparking joy and celebration to a place that is gravely at risk of becoming (not unlike its TV show namesake) a relic of a bygone era.