Event At A $2 Billion Vessel Launch Causes Controversy

A shocking event 

In what was supposed to be a great military moment, the official launch of the HMAS Supply in Sydney last weekend was emphatically upstaged by a hip-hop routine from Sydney dance troupe 101 Doll Squadron. While the unison choreography didn’t have the same faultless precision of most military drills, the squad’s involvement was an apparent attempt by the navy to engage all parts of the local community in the day’s celebrations.

What some cannot believe is that the routine involved “twerking” – a dance move originating in West Africa and now popularised in black urban dance culture – at an otherwise dignified and important event. One Liberal backbencher has called for better standards, with another senior MP labelling it a “shitshow”.

It’s since transpired that the ABC’s now-viral footage of the performance was highly edited and skewed the sequence of events. The Australian Defence Force (ADF) has insisted the most important VIPs, including the Defence chief and Governor-General, weren’t in attendance for the livelier parts of the day.

Nonetheless, the controversy remains. It’s easy to reduce the public outcry to one of shock at the fact that sexually suggestive dancing occurred at a military ceremony. But this distracts from a more uncomfortable question about the type of dance we value as a society and are willing to accept as part of our national identity.

Take the country’s flagship dance company, The Australian Ballet, for example. These dancers regularly perform – without controversy – at high-level government events and diplomatic ceremonies. Abroad, the company has long been used as a tool of soft power, bankrolled and leveraged by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade as an important expression of Australian culture.

In fact, the relationship between ballet and our national identity is so close that, in 2013, renowned choreographer Garry Stewart was commissioned to make a dance work for the company about the building of Parliament House in Canberra. (It’s not clear whether the Sydney hip-hop troupe were asked to do the same for HMAS Supply.)

Celebrating cultural diversity

Championing ballet as a genre of dance worthy of national honour and export is, of course, part of a broader historical preference for the Western canon across all forms of Australian art. This ubiquity means more diverse expressions of movement – Indigenous, urban, folk and so on – are squeezed out of the national psyche and into the local community hall or the nightclub.