Amanda Bullick

Hard Times Hit Parade features dance, clowning, music, puppetry, videography, and animation.

The glitzy popular-dance culture of North America during the 1930s had a dark underbelly. The era of swing, tap, and chorus lines also witnessed a craze for dance marathons—ruthless, and almost always rigged, contests to see which couple could stay upright and moving the longest. In the years following the Wall Street crash, dancing your way to a small fortune seemed worth a try, especially as contestants were fed and had a roof over their heads.

East Vancouver’s Dusty Flowerpot Cabaret draws inspiration for its multidisciplinary production Hard Times Hit Parade from the longest and most brutal marathon of them all—an early ’30s assault on body, mind, and spirit that lasted more than 22 weeks.

“The work is primarily dance-based, of course, but it also involves clowning, music, puppetry, videography, and animation,” says Kat Single-Dain, interviewed in a Commercial Drive apartment. “Dusty Flowerpot is an umbrella for a lot of artists of different disciplines. For this show I’m the writer and also the choreographer and director, which is a lot of hats to wear, but like everything we do it’s also very much a collaborative project.”

The idea for Hard Times Hit Parade came originally from Single-Dain’s mother. “I was studying filmmaking at SFU and looking for a subject for a screenplay when she told me about the marathons. They grabbed my imagination, and so I wrote a full-length piece. Then I put it away for a number of years, until it occurred to me to make it a live show. One of the most satisfying things about the production is that it’s going to be filmed during our four-weekend run of the show. We hope the movie will be out before the year’s end.”

Hard Times Hit Parade features seven dancing couples, as well as local vaudevillian band Maria in the Shower playing popular songs from the ’30s and original compositions in a similar vein. “The band is very much part of the action,” stresses Single-Dain. “And the audience is involved as well, because it becomes the dance-marathon audience. The narrative is about a trio of organizers—the referee, the emcee, and the band leader—who travel the country setting up these events.”

The show focuses on the resilience and sense of community of the marathoners under conditions of incredible duress. The chronic lack of sleep brought hallucinations and caused serious mental- and physical-health problems. Many communities in North America banned dance marathons, or restricted them severely. Eventually, their bad reputation and the slowly improving economic situation led to the disappearance of this sadomasochistic fad.

Hard Times Hit Parade is not a time-bound piece, however. Single-Dain points out a number of unsettling parallels between the North America of the Dirty ’30s and our own era. “There’s a similar sense of crisis, of things drifting to extremes, of desperate behaviour by ordinary people trying to survive, and of environmental degradation—back then it was the creation of the Dustbowl. The dance marathons revealed both the best and the worst sides of human nature, and have a lot to tell us about how things are today.”

Hard Times Hit Parade runs at the Russian Hall every Thursday through Sunday from Thursday (February 24) to March 18.