As we stand in the packed foyer of Melbourne Town Hall, waiting for Mette Ingvartsen's The Dancing Public to start, Richard leans over to me. "You can tell who's had COVID," he says. We are both wearing N95s; most of the audience are not masked. It is a riotous crush of people, yelling and hugging.
In the main hall, the Danish choreographer tells us that tonight we will all be dancing. And we do, joining in with Ingvartsen's dancing as she moves through the crowd, narrating our need to dance. It feels freeing to be moving together like this. Then, the tone shifts: continuously moving, Ingvartsen begins to narrate stories of mass hysteria, where whole villages started to uncontrollably, unstoppably dance together. No one quite knows how to react.
