Australian Salmon Dance

This morning at work they called me to ask me to go to one of the offices. There was a group of people huddled around the computer watching this video entitled the Salmon Dance

 One of the performers from this “Contemporary Dance” works on my floor. When I watched this video, I admit that some of the first images that sprang to mind were the dances performed at school graduations, Marty the landlord from The Big  Lebowski and in the Monty Python Fish Slapping Dance. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But what do I know?

I don’t want to say more about the video. I’ll let you make your own minds. The song is by the Chemical Brothers.  There’s more to follow in my comments below.

THe Salmon Dance from danni dance on Vimeo.

Mudo’s comments

It’s from a festival that different groups from Melbourne Contemporary Dance perform in. The “Salmon” who works with me has been absent from work for the last few days in order to put the finishing touches on the performance just as he should be doing. He asked me if I wanted to sign up for one of these classes. Every 3 months they do a performance like this.

I asked him if they were going to be new performances but the answer was so long that … I didn’t really take the answer in.

Original Spanish Version

No country for rabbits

This weekend, I saw a lot of creatures that you can only find here in Australia. The culprit behind the fact that many of these animals can only be seen in captivity is the rabbit. Apparently, someone from Europe thought that Australia should have rabbits. It seems that he was English and his intention was to hunt them. Anyway, 24 rabbits (2) were brought over to the island continent (1).

They were set free to run around the countryside.  And living up to the popular saying, they reproduced. A lot. A few decades later, there were 600 million rabbits (3).  And of course they destroyed all the Australian vegetation and in the process, all the animals that fed off it.

Years later, in 1950, in order to combat the rabbit problem (exterminate them), they introduced an illness which would not affect the other animals, but would affect the rabbits:  myxomatosis. Well it did away with nearly all the rabbits, but as it always happens in these cases, it made the others immune as well as their future generations.  And so, the plague returned.

A while back, they tried to eliminate them with a new virus (RDHV).It seems to be working well. But in anticipation of some of the rabbits being immune, they should be already working on a solution for future plagues.

We have the same problem in Spain with pigeons. I’m not sure whether they have destroyed the eco-system somewhere or just the street furniture (public benches, phoneboxes, fountains, phone booths etc).

(1) A word to the wise: don’t bring up Oceania here: Australia is a continent. Period. 
(2) This figure is like others that I give you on the blog; out of the varying figures that I find, I choose the figure that seems the most reliable from the ones that are the most similar.   
(3) Perhaps what I am about to say isn’t strictly  true but surely someone must have thought of it before- imagining so many rabbits on a small little thing like Australia on a map, makes you shudder.

Original Spanish Entry