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Ivan Dayman’s first dance venture in Melbourne was at the Canterbury Ballroom, ex Hoyts theatre. In Maling Street Canterbury - According to emerging singer Marcie Jones:

They were usually old picture theatres. So you’d go down underneath, they’d take up all the seats, so they had great flooring, good for dancing, where they showed the picture, there was this huge, big stage … [and] the huge dance floor, and it was so fantastic. And you had to be able to [jive] dance or learn pretty quickly … the boys would come up to you and say, ‘Do you want to dance?’; and if they didn’t ask you like that, you’d say, ‘No thanks’, because we knew they couldn’t dance that way … No booze, just soft drinks. (Jones 2017)

Changes within venues didn’t seem inevitable. Dances maintained the practice of rotating singers with designated house bands at a town hall or theatre, while older music traditions also had to be observed: So it was 60/40, so you’d have 40% foxtrots and waltzes and things like that, and then the other 60% would be rock and roll … I started going to the dances when I was about 15 and my girlfriends Jo and Glenda, they were like my sisters …

The Canterbury Ballroom & Malcolm Arthur

The first dance we went to was Canterbury Ballroom and The Thunderbirds were playing … My girlfriends went up to Malcolm Arthur – he was compering and singing with The Thunderbirds – and they said, ‘My girlfriend sings. Can she get up and sing a song?’ and of course, they get that all the time from girls. Probably half of them are awful, but he said, ‘If she wants to, she can audition on a Saturday’. So I went down and I auditioned on the Saturday and sang ‘Robot Man’ and ‘Lipstick On Your Collar’ and got the job, and I sang with the T-Birds for about 15 months or something and Ivan Dayman ran that dance. (Jones 2018)

By the late 1950s, there was a good circuit of city and suburban dances including the Circle Ballroom at Preston, the Earls Court Ballroom at St Kilda, the Arcadia Ballroom, Thornbury, the Pascoe Vale Town Hall and the Coburg Town Hall.- Authors Shane Homan - Seamus O’Hanlon - Catherine Strong - John Tebbutt

Canterbury Ballroom leaflet-Courtesy of Bruce Stewart

Contributed by Greg Lynch - dimensional1@bigpond.com