Blokes of the dance

By TIM WATKIN

Forget Fred Astaire. Walter Fairless is tapping away on the Queen St concrete, outside the Force Entertainment Centre, in flannel shirt, jeans and boots. The 8-year-old and 14 other boys known as Boyzdance are drawing a fast and furious rhythm out of the very street.

It's the local premiere of Aussie dance'n'grind flick Bootmen, based on the Tap Dogs stage show that has swept the world and was showcased at the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony.

The film, taking steps from The Full Monty and Fame, is directed by Tap Dogs creator Dein Perry, who grew up in working-class Newcastle and started work as a fitter and turner aged 17. Thing was, the boy could dance. After a stint on the boards in Sydney, he choreographed his own show, mining his home town's industrial works for inspiration.

With iron on his boots and steel in his shins, he took tap to new places. Since his puppy found its legs in the early 90s, Tap Dogs has become a $A70 million ($88 million) phenomenon.

Dance teachers in New Zealand hope that the arrival of Bootmen — and, when local distributors get hold of it, the similar but grittier Billy Elliot from Britain — might encourage more boys to check out the dance studio, rather than heading straight for the rugby field.

And straight is one of the operative words. What both films make clear — yet again — is that the stereotype of dance being for girls and gays is downright stupid.

Nick Banks, one of Boyzdance's male teachers, says dance is still seen as effeminate and peer pressure prompts a lot of boys to drop dancing by their early teens. He's confident Bootmen will boost more boys into dance and start a new craze.

"Definitely. Dance movies and the like always help a particular type of dance. With Riverdance and Lord of the Dance, everyone wanted to do Irish dance and Strictly Ballroom did much the same for ballroom."

As Fairless will be sure to tell you, this stuff is cool.

"I like just grooving around and stuff. Lots of people come to watch us and then I get to meet lots of people out in the world. And it's fun."

What other kids think of dance depends on the music. "If it's la, le, la, le stuff, nah."

But most of the Boyzdance beats come straight from the top 20. They look more like boy band 5ive, than the old "one, two, three, four, kick." Their routines are based around songs and moves from the likes of Backstreet Boys and N Sync. Even down to its rip-off of pop group Boyzone, groups like Boyzdance are the dance equivalent of boy bands.

Jacqui Cesan, Boyzdance national co-ordinator and director of the Dance Studio, says tap is dying here because most teachers haven't changed their routines since the 60s.

"They're still doing the same stuff: cheesy, ridiculous gestures, sequined shorts, the whole thing and, frankly, the kids aren't into it."

Douglas Mills, captain of the Tap Dogs troupe at age 20, pays tribute to the past, but says dance has changed.

"[Fred] Astaire, who started it all off, invented more than half of the steps we do today. He's a legend ... What we have done is to bring tap-dancing further forward as it had been forgotten in the last 10 years."

Cesan agrees. "Fred Astaire's tails? Most kids don't know what tails are. It's just a whole different era. That's why we've got to get real about dance."

A mother of three boys, Cesan says her middle son summed it up when he said they love Bootmen-style tap because "it's less like tap, more like drumming."

She says while the New Zealand dance scene is largely too conservative to come up with something like Tap Dogs — Tap Props or Boots'n'All, perhaps? — we see the same "movement vocabulary and teamwork" in the likes of Black Grace. What's more, the local talent is out there in communities where music and dance are pivotal. Cesan was at a talent quest in South Auckland recently.

"I could have cried. There was wall-to-wall talent. I could have taken 50 of those kids, put them in tap classes and they'd have been shining stars in two weeks. I have a Boyzdance troupe of 15 here [in Mt Eden], I could probably have a group of 1500 out there."

She hopes some government money and the enthusiasm Bootmen might generate will allow Boyzdance to grow. So get out your taps and flannels and get ready to shuffle and jive.