Happy As Larry
Shaun Parker & Company
The Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall
22 March 2011
I’m not hugely into dance, other than occasionally having a one-on-one dance-off with a friend to see who has the best shit moves. When I said I’d review Happy As Larry, my only expectation was that surely, these dancers wouldn’t be busting out any technically difficult moves like The Running Man, Shaking the Dice, The Robot or Feeding the Chickens.
Larry is based on the Enneagram, a typology of human personality; more specifically, it defines nine different personality types and how these types experience happiness in very different ways. Pretty deep for a school night, but Larry was a bright and easy-to-digest interpretation of it. Each of Larry‘s nine dancers, all from different backgrounds and trainings, represented one of the Enneagram’s types: The Perfectionist, the Seducer, the Performer, the Tragic Romantic, The Observer, The Boss and The Mediator. Consequently, Larry is a study of the human response to happiness, the relationship between happiness and sadness (and all that lies in between) and why some of us are happier than others.
Staged at the North Melbourne Town Hall using a very simple set consisting of a giant, double-sided rotating chalkboard (used by the dancers to help visualise the emotion of the performance), I walked away completely and pleasantly delighted by the show. It was heartfelt, uplifting, colourful and optimistic. Have you ever finished watching a film where it’s left you feeling really great and really happy? This is exactly how Larry felt to me. It had some fantastic laugh-out-loud moments by some wonderfully talented dancers (NAISDA graduate, Ghenoa Gela, was superb); the choreography was stunning and sat perfectly alongside the pulsating beats of the musical score. I left feeling blissfully happy and if it ever rolls into town again, it would be a shame to miss it.
