Then I Feel A Change.

Billy Elliot the musical has played an important part in my life, it was the first thing I ever saw on stage where I cried, it was the first story where parts of it resounded true to my life, and so it was the first time I realised the deep power that art can have on you. Billy Elliot is about so many things, the power of dreams and being inspired; the challenge of frustration and the burning desire within each of us to achieve. This is tied into such a beautiful and yet tragic story of the Durham Minors. I first saw this musical in 2005, and since then I have seen it every year, and not just in this country! I saw it in Sydney Australia! It was amazing to see the musical translate to the other end of the world. Yes, the importance of the minors strike was perhaps a little lost, but the true power of the story – the boy who wanted to dance, still digested itself into the audience like a footprint in newly fallen snow, where the feeling is familiar and yet still excitingly new.
Every year three new Billy Elliot’s take to the stage and begin a journey that, for them must be incredible. They are living the very dream they are conveying, which unlike any other musical means the performance really does come straight from the heart.
You don’t need to want to dance for the story to affect you. Deep within all of us, is a dream of us being who we were born to be. The song Electricity hits a deep chord with me and perhaps is the moment where the very words collide with such a powerful melody and crash into the audience:
“It’s a bit like being angry, it’s a bit like being scared….. and then I feel a change like a burning deep inside, something bursting me wide open, impossible to hide, and suddenly I’m flying, flying like the stars, like electricity… sparks inside of me, and I’m free, I’m free”
Has anyone asked you to describe what happens when you do something that you love; really love? When everything in your life disappears and you become whole in a such a way it is like you have nothing else in your life that makes you feel so complete. Those moments are like our electricity.
We should never stop believing in those dreams, and never fail to enjoy every single moment when we can, for a second do what it is we love to do. And so back to the arts in general. I love them, and I will always love what it can do! It can inspire you and it can transform lives. Art can make you look at life in way you never have before, and it can take you places beyond your wildest dreams.

We All Need Our 24 Moment

I undoubtedly will get responses to this accusing me of sounding like I have a slightly pince-nez view of the modern world, and to write to young people in such a way is superfluous. But I have words to fill and a deadline to meet, and so I ponder further.

I have just finished reading a book by Adam Shand called “Big Shots”. It describes what occurred during the recent gangland wars in the city of Melbourne, where I spent nearly three months last year. In the prologue he writes: “Those intending to embark on a career in the underworld would do well to sit down and watch an old James Cagney movie “The Roaring Twenties”. The moral is not that crime doesn’t pay – it pays well, extraordinary well if you get it right – but that eventually death takes it whack”.

On the surface of this almost precocious warning lies something quite outstanding. Of course this coming from a book on gangland wars makes it harder to connect to, but it is the very same principle that for example Harry Potter is based on, that Spooks and Desperate Housewives, 24, House etc all these epic pieces of modern television drama rock quite easily on a base of good over evil and choice over talent.
Very often we are placed in situations, which demand a decision of catch 22, the proverbial phrase where one bad situation lessons a potentially devastating one.
We are just out of a recession, we are now officially poor yet to cut the deficit, money needs to be found elsewhere, so something has to go, to quit, and so imaginably to suffer. The problem with these 22 moments is that they need a 24 person.
Yes President Palmer and Jack Bauer, even under torture and pressure still have the courage to make a decision, even if it proves to be the wrong one. Thus bringing back into the forecourt the idea that so often choice wins over talent. I have a bomb I know will detonate, do I explode it in a hospital where there are over 1000 patients, or in a children’s nursery where there are 15 infants? Death will occur in both cases and I have sixty seconds to decide.

Yet deep within most of is that 24 character. Thankfully we are not placed in situations where other lives are at stake, but there does come such a time for all of us where our choices will define us, when beauty no longer cuts it like power and pride, both of which in us as humans so often fail to rise to anything more then a froth. But we need to be waves. Power and pride have for so long been beaten and thrown to us as corrupt assets in a human. Yet humility and a coy soul have seemingly led us to be an aggressive nation where we replace insecurity with a lack of motivation and self-limitation with violence. “Power Corrupts” said Winston Churchill. It shouldn’t any more; we should be empowered as young people more then ever. Power corrupts when we mistake it for an immediate pathway to self-perfection. When we expect ourselves to be perfect, and it goes wrong it is one thousand times more catastrophic. But the time is now where young people must cling to every opportunity they have to make decisions for themselves and begin to see potential within. We all have to realise that failure comes to visit us once in a while. But failure isn’t defeat!
Even Jack Bauer gets it wrong, and like Jack we need that scene where we look in the mirror and say clearly that we have got it wrong. And with that, we must go back to the enormous blank canvas being painted with our lives.
When we have the courage to face our problems and make decisions in spite of consequences that may be difficult, we are renewed with a certain creative energy. Fear, shame and guilt often make us stay in isolation. It is by showing our wounds, by allowing ourselves to touch and be touched by the sometimes-forceful hand of life itself, that we are challenged yet graced with some contentment.
Now is the time to play hero, just be ready to think what happens when the bomb is in your hands.