By Casey Neill
Comedian Damian Callinan is dancing his way around Australia and swinging by Montrose on the way.
“I’ve been a full-time comedian and performer for just over 20 years now but prior to that I was a school teacher, so I was in the one room all day every day,” he said.
“I now probably spend about four months of the year on the road.”
He was last in Montrose about five years ago, he told the Mail.
“I think I was actually there with my show The Merger, which is the story of a country footy club that recruits refugees,” he said.
Two days after Montrose show the film adaption of the show will premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival.
The Merger was a one-man show where Damian played nine characters – including two sock puppets.
“This one’s a little bit straighter,” he said.
“I do this show as myself, attempting to learn to swing dance inside four months.
“I jump in and out of character. That’s the nature of the shows I do.”
Damian transforms into a swing dancer from the USA deep-south and a French dance specialist.
“I’m so used to performing on my own it’s like muscle memory,” he said.
“You just change physicality as well as the voice that comes with it.
“Dad was an actor as well but a school teacher primarily.
“He used to read to me at night, but he’d do it in accents.
“I just thought that’s what you did, I just thought it was a normal thing.
“We’d talk in accents over the dinner table.
“Later on I realised not everyone got their dad to read to them, and not everyone talks in accents.”
Dancing has also come naturally to Damian.
“I did previously do a show called Cave to the Rave,” he said.
“It’s more about the sociology of the dance floor and culminates with a story about me dancing at a party in the Dandenong Ranges.
“I’d never learnt how to partner dance.
“I was at a bar in Paris and my wife and I were sitting there and all of a sudden the band changed music.
“Swing dancers appeared out of nowhere.”
He felt admiration and jealousy so sought out lessons when he returned home.
The details sat on the fridge for two years, untouched.
“That became the journey of the show,” he said.
“I learnt the dance and wrote the show at the same time.”
Dancer Genevieve will join him on stage.
“Everything in the show is based slightly on reality but it’s kind of an elaborate storytelling,” Damian said.
He said the part where he’s abducted by swing-dancing aliens sets the scene for audiences to not believe a word of the show.
“Most of it is kind of real, except for that aspect,” he said.
Swing Man is on at Montrose Town Centre from 8pm on Thursday 9 August.
Visit www.yarraranges.vic.gov.au for tickets.
