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For the first time in decades, the Flinders Street Station ballroom will resound with the noise of stomping, shuffling and gliding feet as the Rising arts festival stages a season of public dance classes in the grand and fabled space high above platform 1.
“We’ve got a big focus on dance and music across the whole program this year,” says Hannah Fox, artistic director of the festival. “And as part of that, we’re looking at the history of Flinders Street ballroom as an amazing community dance space.”
Designed in 1899 and opened in 1910, Flinders Street Station housed all manner of facilities for Victorian Railways Institute staff in a warren of rooms over four levels (including the roof, which had a caretaker’s cottage).
There was a classroom for new Australians, a children’s nursery (for female railway workers and shoppers visiting the city by train), and classrooms where workers could take lessons with the aim of rising through the ranks.
The real gold, though, was on the third floor, which held a gymnasium, a library, a billiard room and the arch-ceilinged ballroom, a multi-function space that was used for lectures, meetings and, of course, dance classes during its heyday.
“It was quite a Utopian model,” says Fox of the VRI campus at the southern gateway to the city. “It was much more than a train station.”
But by the 1960s the ballroom had begun to fall into disrepair, and in 1985 – beset by leaks, crumbling plaster, tonnes of pigeon droppings, and decaying parquetry floors – it was declared a hazard and closed to the public. For decades thereafter, the space lived on only in memory and myth.
“I’d always been fascinated with it,” says Fox, who first tried to use the space around 2009, when she was a music curator for the Melbourne International Arts Festival (Rising’s precursor). But while a couple of sound and light projects were staged from there, it wasn’t until after the $100 million refurbishment of the station in 2018 that it became feasible to admit the public.
Rising’s first use of the third floor was for Patricia Piccinini’s installation A Miracle Constantly Repeated in its first (and COVID-interrupted) season in 2021. It has since used it for Rone’s Time (2022), the indigenous-themed Shadow Spirit (2023), and last year’s Swingers – The Art of Mini-Golf.
For the first time this year, the space will revisit its origins with dance classes in various styles, from ballroom to breaking to boot-scooting and beyond (including our very own Melbourne Shuffle), for $29 a session.
The season is part of a broad program of dance that is inspired, says Fox, by “just how popular dance is in Australian culture. Not only do we really love to dance as a people, but we’re also really good at it.
“There’s hundreds of thousands of people dancing for TikTok or in town squares or in their bedrooms, and with the rise of rave culture, dancing has become part of how we go out and gather. So we wanted to tell this story through the program – and Land of 1000 Dances in the ballroom is one of them.”
This is Fox’s first year as solo artistic director, as Gideon Obarzanek, founder of Chunky Move and her co-director from Rising’s inception in 2020, is now heading up the Australian Dance Biennale which will be staged for the first time this year as part of Rising.
While the biennale will bring some of the world’s best dancers to Melbourne, the classes in the ballroom and the free mass dance class to be staged at Federation Square by New Zealand-based The Royal Family Dance Crew are designed with enthusiasm rather than expertise in mind.
“I think we all approach a dance class with some level of trepidation, but you very quickly just become absorbed in following along, and the embarrassment quickly fades away,” says Fox, who confesses she once spent six months practising a 90-second routine “that I still messed up”.
As for the ballroom and the rest of the rooms in the upper levels of Flinders Street Station, they are now safe and functional but still a long way from their original glory (the ballroom ceiling, for instance, is exposed timber and steel, rather than the ornate plaster of old).
“It would take an enormous investment” to fully restore it, Fox concedes. “But I think this kind of temporary interim use for intimate events and exhibitions is a really good way to keep it active, and keep telling the story of that building.”
