Dance returns to Flinders Street Ballroom after decades away
For the first time in decades, Flinders Street Station’s ballroom will ring with the din of stomping, shuffling and gliding feet as the Rising arts festival stages a season of public dance lessons in the grand and legendary space above Platform 1.
“This year we have placed great emphasis on dance and music throughout the programme,” says the festival’s artistic director, Hannah Fox. “And as part of that, we’re looking at the history of the Flinders Street ballroom as a fantastic community dance space.”
Designed in 1899 and opened in 1910, Flinders Street Station housed a full range of facilities for Victorian Railway Institute staff (including the roof where the guardhouse was located) over four floors of rooms.
There was a classroom for new Australians, a nursery (for female railway workers and shoppers visiting the city by train) and classrooms where workers could take lessons to move up the ranks.
But the real gold was on the third floor, which housed a gym, library, billiards room and vaulted-ceilinged ballroom, a multifunctional space used in its heyday for conferences, meetings and, of course, dance lessons.
“It was a pretty utopian model,” says Fox from the VRI campus at the city’s southern entrance. “It was much more than a train station.”
But by the 1960s the ballroom began to fall into disrepair, and in 1985 – beset by leaks, crumbling plaster, tons of pigeon droppings and rotting hardwood floors – it was declared a hazard and closed to the public. For the next decades, space lived on only in memories and legends.
“I’ve always been fascinated by it,” says Fox, who first tried to use the space in 2009, when he was music curator at the Melbourne International Arts Festival (a precursor to Rising). Only after a $100 million renovation of the station in 2018 did public admission become possible, while several sound and light projects were staged from there.
Rising’s first use of the third floor was for Patricia Piccinini’s installation A Repeating Miracle In his first (and COVID-interrupted) season of 2021. He’s used it for Rone’s ever since. Time (2022), domestic themed Shadow Spirit (2023) and last year Swingers – The Art of Mini Golf.
This year, for the first time, the venue will revisit its origins with dance classes in a variety of styles, from ballroom to breaking, boating and beyond (including our own Melbourne Shuffle) for $29 per session.
Fox says the season is part of a wider dance program inspired by how popular dance is in Australian culture: “Not only do we really love dancing as humans, but we’re also really good at it.”
“For TikTok, there are hundreds of thousands of people dancing in town squares or in their bedrooms, and with the rise of rave culture, dancing has become part of the way we go out and get together. So we wanted to tell that story through the program — and Land of 1000 Dances There’s one of them in the ballroom too.”
This is Fox’s first year as solo artistic director; Gideon Obarzanek, founder of Chunky Move and co-director of Rising since its inception in 2020, currently chairs 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 ballroom classes and the free mass dance class the New Zealand-based Royal Family Dance Company will stage in Federation Square have been designed with enthusiasm rather than expertise.
“I think we all approach a dance class with a certain level of trepidation, but very quickly you get caught up in following and the embarrassment quickly fades away,” says Fox, who once spent six months practicing a 90-second routine, admitting that “I still mess up.”
As for the ballroom and the rest of the rooms on the upper floors of Flinders Street Station, they are now safe and functional but still a long way from their original splendor (the ballroom ceiling, for example, is made of exposed wood and steel rather than the ornate plaster of old).
Fox acknowledges that fully restoring it “would require a tremendous investment.” “But I think this kind of temporary use for intimate events and exhibitions is a really good way to keep it active and continue to tell the story of that building.”
