Friday, July 2, 2010

Dance Academy


Every now and again I find a television program that takes over my head. I watch each episode religiously, organising my life around it if necessary. I demand silence, I turn down the lights and I throw myself, head first, into another world. When the credits roll my head is buzzing and I feel slightly dizzy. There’s a weird sense of loss as I grapple with re-entering the real world and have to deal with the long painful wait until I can sit back down and do it all again.

We all know that feeling. Like most people I used to get it from a good book until a fated trip to the optometrist. Now I get my escapism in pictorial form, risking square eyes instead of eye strain. I’ll be the first to admit my TV obsession is bordering on the insane. But I like to think of it as an investment in my
future.


These obsessions seem to happen at times when real life is insanely boring, overly complicated or just not really worth the hassle. Times when escaping into an alternate reality seems infinitely preferable to dealing with the here and now. Sometimes it’s a 1980’s police station, a supernatural share house or inside my favourite blue box, right now it’s a dance studio in an artificially sunny Sydney.


Dance Academy is a children’s drama series which follows a group of teenagers in their first year at the National Academy of Dance. Take the assumptions you just made about this show and rip them into little pieces. Its clever, its witty and its sharp. The amount of stuff this show has managed to deal with in twenty-six episodes is amazing- friendships, crushes, first kisses, cheating, break-ups, fights, sexuality, sex, secrets, betrayal, backstabbing, dreams, aspirations, disappointments, sacrifice and regret. Here you have life in a series of half hour episodes about dancing.


The thing is, I turn nineteen next week and it is the general consensus of those around me that I’m a bit too old for children’s television. But I’ll never be too old to watch good actors perform an impressive script from within a solid concept. Good TV is good TV and Australia does drama for kids like it does nothing else.


I think sex, drugs and complicated themes don’t always enhance a script. Sometimes shows get caught up in what they can show us and forget to decide what we need to see. Just because the time slot allows a sex scene doesn’t mean the relationship warrants it.

Kids TV has to be more clever. The creators need to address a lot of the same issues and themes that an adult program would deal with. But it needs to do it for a much more complicated audience. Read the list above and remember how much harder all those things seemed when you were seventeen. I’m still dealing with most of them. And I’m dealing with them alongside the horrible realisation that I’m not a kid anymore. Life is just going to get messier. Right now the sunny, simple messiness of Dance is the place I want to be.

And so I’m going to spend my nineteenth birthday basking in the finale of Dance Academy and leave worrying about turning twenty for another day.


The final episode of Dance Academy airs on ABC1 at 5:20 on Monday (5th of July) but it’ll be around for a while at various times on ABC3. Check your guides.