Corporate Queensland to get funky

BRISBANE - Forget the office gym ball, 10-minute massages and aromatherapy healing sessions.

Queensland businesses could this year be making their employees take one-hour funk and tap dance classes to de-stress and shape-up.

Australia's hottest male dance company, Brisbane-based Raw Metal, is planning to teach corporate Queensland some of its own funk-laden moves, replacing boring business lunches with choreographed dance classes.

The group, internationally lauded for its unpolished and eclectic dance style, will launch the Raw Metal Workshop Studios at the Brisbane Powerhouse next month.

And it has corporate types in its sights.

"We're looking at targeting other businesses around a couple of the surrounding suburbs and saying, 'Hey, you've taken on gym for your employees, how about you run something totally different and you do an eight-week programme of funk-tap with the Raw Metal boys'," Raw Metal frontman Andrew Fee said today.

"It would just be something really outside what normal companies do for their employees."

Fee said he was hoping to target small to medium-sized businesses in inner-city suburbs such as Fortitude Valley, New Farm, Teneriffe and Bowen Hills.

He said the idea to get business booties moving came after the group was asked to choreograph a performance with National Australia Bank executives two years ago.

"There's all these old guys, and a few old women as well ... they had so much fun and learnt the routine with us," Fee said.

"All the employees just loved it. I think that sort of idea, to try and take it out and market it more to local businesses would work really well."

A lesson in "funk tap", which incorporates tap, funk moves, slides and body percussion choreographed to the "latest and funkiest music", was like sweating it out at the gym, Fee said.

- AAP