Not over till the slim lady sings

It (the opera of Truss's ephemeral prime ministership) isn't over till the slim libertarian lady sings.

Similarly, for those of us besotted with plays, ballet and opera, there was a half-expectation on Tuesday evening that Treasurer Jim Chalmers, having danced to the Chamber's table, would sing his budget speech.

Have I exaggerated and dramatised things in saying that Liz Truss and Jim Chalmers "danced" to the spots from which they spoke?

No. Not at all. For I am writing this week under the influence of a new book, Annie B. Parson's The Choreography Of Everyday Life, which argues that life (with all of its everyday movements) and dance are indistinguishable from one another.

Here are some of her book's ideas as curated for us by Charlie Tyson in his new piece for The Atlantic, called The Secret Of How We Move, and reviewing a cluster of new books about dance and dancers.

"Parson, an acclaimed choreographer best known for her genre-bending work combining dance with theatre, offers an exuberant conception of human life as a collective dance, winding and unspooling in endless variations as we move through time and space.

"For her, dance is not a rarefied form. It is more like the natural, everyday motion of strolling down the street, which, after all, involves considerations of line, space, and tempo. City life, especially, requires dancelike coordination: Strangers streaming down the sidewalk must find a 'group rhythm'.

"If we look at the world through Parson's eyes, we find that dance is all around us, in people stretching or hugging or standing in line."

Or even (this is me now, not Charlie Tyson) in Liz Truss's walking from 10 Downing Street's front step to her lectern just across the street, with what a "body language expert" described for the Daily Mail as "a bizarre bravado in her body language and that bouncy walk she has done a lot in the Commons".

So we are all "natural choreographers", Annie Parson insists, continually navigating through space, expressing ourselves through action.

For Parson, one of dance's key functions is its role in political assembly. Readers, if you've taken part in marches, lie-ins, sit-ins, or any organised act of protest, then you've been dancing, Parson points out, since "these acts of protest are choreographies: the body in space has intentional directives agreed upon by the performers".

As the American composer John Cage has remarked, formal theatre exists to remind us that theatre is already happening all around us. This is so with dance, which pays tribute to the rhythms we share as we move together through time. Ah, life as a cabaret! Blissfully aesthetic.

What is the difference, theatrically, operatically, between Julia Gillard's famous, thrilling, "misogyny" speech (much celebrated in recent days for its 10th anniversary) and a fine soprano's angry shrilling of Donna Anna's famous, thrilling "Vendetta/Vengeance" aria Or sai chi l'onore

Is there any difference? I can barely tell them apart. How about you, reader? Both rage-dramas, each one aimed at a vile, misogynist monster (Julia's aimed at Tony Abbott, Donna Anna's at swine Don Giovanni) are freely available on YouTube for those who want to compare them.

Sport, too, is essentially theatrical. The average footy fan might reject, scoffing, the idea that when he goes to the MCG to watch an Aussie Rules match (with its cast of at least 36 choreographed dancers on that broad stage at any one time), he is going to something so snobby and girly as the ballet.

But, Parson would say (and I would agree with her) that he, the average footy fan, is wrong and that while all football codes are displays of dance, Australian Rules football is the most beautifully balletic of all.

You could swear, sometimes, that the match you are watching has been put on not by the AFL but by the Bolshoi.

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