The weight of a crowbar versus the weight of your heart | March 2020

Some people complained and said our last newsletter had no news in it.

So this is our new newsy newsletter with so much news you’ll wish we hadn’t written it, but first we have to ask what is news?

It used to be the stuff you would flick through in your broadsheet newspaper with a piece of buttered raisin toast in one hand, a simmering cup of loose leaf prince of wales tea in the other and a fanning manservant at your elbow, but no longer.

News has been democratised.

Or it’s a joke, depending on where you stand. In this instance let’s define news this way... news is about us. The Farm. Here’s what we’re doing right now:

The Farm are the first Queenslanders to ever reach the semi-finals of the Keir Choreographic Awards!

Which is weird because we don’t remember attending the quarter finals.

And actually we don’t even remember strapping on boots or running through a big flag or having rough, oily massages or anything! We just sent a video of our latest stupid idea called 'Hold me closer Tony Danza' and the next thing we knew we were in.

In Tony we trust.

It’s a work about the mistakes we make, the judgements we’re prone to and our inability to see the reality of our own borderless natures. Oh and it features a soundtrack by Elton John.

Now we’ve never been to a choreographic competition before but we’re thinking of going all Tonya Harding on this thing…

That’s Tonya on the right. Nancy Kerrigan is on the left, perhaps trying to skate again after the unfortunate knee incident…

But as we were looking into the weight differences between crowbars and hammers something stopped us in our tracks. Quite literally, farmers bumped into the backs of other farmers causing a whole lot of farmers and farm machinery to fall over in a big pile of Farm.

We couldn’t shake the thought, is this how we want to be?

Competitive?

Maybe it’s because we just finished Bare Bones, our mostly annual three day workshop series of dance, life, connection, life, community, life and life. And it changed us. We started as strangers and ended as… well... Imagine Nancy and Tonya sharing a beer after the ‘knee thing' and laughing. Deep belly laughs.

“I can’t believe you hired that guy to hit me!” Says Nancy

“I didn’t, haven’t you seen my film?” Says Tonya as she skulls her pint.

And again they laugh because they feel connected, not through figure skating, or competition or knee injuries or even the effects of the beer.

They feel connected because they are. We all are. Even though Tonya and Nancy cut different patterns in their lycra, underneath them it’s all just a single block of ice.

Just think about that for a bit…

Because it’s quite confusing.

After having a lie down and a good think, we cancelled the contracts on the other contestants and owned up to what was really going on.

You see, even though we are in the semi finals of a prestigious national dance-sport competition, we have to admit we don’t always know what we are doing. We take risks and those risks expose us, like a streaker getting smacked on the arse by Tony Chappell.

So in answer to the question what is news, we think it's not just the newsy bits that matter. Sure we're going to the semi-finals of the Keir dance-sport spectacular and we just nailed another Bare Bones, but sometimes, what gets left out of the news is often more interesting than the news itself. For instance how did the streaker feel later that night? I mean apart from extreme buttock soreness, how was he? 

News is not only about facts, it's also about feelings. The feelings we share when we're lying on the floor at Bare Bones or Nancy's feelings when she held back Tonya's hair in the toilets later that (imaginary) evening.

That's why we are admitting in this newsy newsletter that we're feeling scared of the competition we'll face at the semi-finals of the Keir trans-national open teams dance-sport competition finals. Yes, we're feeling afraid but it won't stop us from running through the giant flag on opening night at Dancehouse, or from having a bloody good go, or from heckling the other acts in spontaneous bursts of pride in our own performance.

As Brene Brown said "it takes courage to enter the arena in contemporary dance finals and do heaps of choreography in an attempt to win fifty thousand bucks."

She's right. It does take courage but that's what we artists do.

We risk.

We risk so that if we achieve something sublime we can all see ourselves in it. All of us on that pitch, in the mud. Face down in the dirt but with the ball in our hands.

“In an earthquake, I shouldn't run out of the house -- I should run into it.”
Tony Danza