Dancing is one of the oldest rituals in the world. It’s where women and men connect with each other and maybe go home together. This applies to same sex couples as well. You can’t have dancing without music. Four years ago at a Chris Wilson acoustic gig at the Old Colonial Hotel in Brunswick Street, most of the audience sat at their tables while two blonde women danced at the back of the venue. One of the women asked a self proclaimed poet if he wanted to dance and he declined saying he was dancing on the inside.

Brunswick Street, once a hub of live music only has one venue left, The Evelyn Hotel, featuring bands. Bimbos, formerly the Punters Club have DJ’s late at night but the crowd talk over the music, drinking their expensive cocktails and are too cool to dance. The only other venue is the Perseverance Hotel and they have DJ’s but no dance floor and the crowds that go there aren’t there for the music.

But they dance in St Kilda. From the glory days of the Seaview Ballroom and The Venue in the early 80’s to the Prince of Wales Hotel of today they come to dance.

Recently the last episode of the current series of Rockwiz was filmed in the Gershwin room, and while the audience ate their dinner during a break in filming two young women danced together in the front bar of the Esplanade Hotel as a DJ played his set. They were oblivious to the small crowd watching them and they prowled the dance floor: two women who weren’t glamorous beauties but no one looked sexier than them as they danced. At this years St Kilda Festival as the DJ’s, Cut Copy, played their set a woman at the back of the large crowd danced on her own as her friends sat down. They wouldn’t dance with her so she looked around the crowd for another woman dancing and joined her and then the two of them skipped together to the front of the stage. They danced together and didn’t care what anyone else thought.
They even dance in Poetry gigs in St Kilda. On a Monday night at Claypots Bar in Barkly Street three poets had finished reading and the owner, a poet himself, played some music over the sound system. A young man came off the street and into the bar, started to dance, and one of the female poets who had just read, got up from her table and danced with him.

During the glory days of The Venue which is now the site of the Novetel Hotel, people came from all over Melbourne to dance to bands such as the

People have always danced in St Kilda. They danced last year at the Salsa Night celebrating the opening of the newly restored St Kilda Town Hall. They dance every weekend at Cushion on Fitzroy Street. They dance at the St Kilda Bowls club to the bands that play there. They dance on Fitzroy Street to the buskers. They dance every night at the Vineyard Restaurant. They dance to the bands who play at the Thursday night market at the O’Donnell gardens. They danced at the official opening night party of the St Kilda  Festival and during the live and local program at the many venues.

Fitzroy has forsaken its live music culture and replaced it with trendy bars and cafes. The business and traders of St Kilda have not made that same mistake which is why they support the St Kilda Festival and the Live and Local program. On a hot summers night in 1992 a woman spontaneously danced the flamenco on the table at Topolino’s in Fitzroy street. The owner didn’t protest and when she had finished he went up to her and gave her a glass of wine.

They don’t dance in Fitzroy because they are too cool. They still dance every Sunday night at the Prince of Wales Hotel. They danced every weekend at the Palace Complex before it was burnt down. There are bands seven nights a week at the Esplanade Hotel and the people come to dance, like they did in the late 1980’s when bands like Zydeco Jump and Relax with Max played every Sunday. In St Kilda all the cool people dance, not because they are drunk or on ecstasy, but because the music compels them to go onto the dance floor and perform the ancient ritual.

They dance every Sunday night at the Big Mouth Café. They dance at the Dalton bar. They dance upstairs at Veludo. They danced at the numerous stages of the St Kilda Festival, supported by the City of Port Phillip which knows that music is the very essence of St Kilda. Mothers and fathers who walk with their teenage children down Acland Street once danced to the Hunters and Collectors, Mental as Anything, and The Birthday Party, at the Prince of Wales party in the 1980s long before it was renovated. You can’t dance to a painting or poetry but you can dance to music. Here in St Kilda music has long been present and when a woman asks you to dance, you don’t say no, but get up and join her.

And you don’t care what people think because dancing with a woman is the coolest thing in the world to do.