‘THE room for error is quite great,” dancer Kurt Phelan says, with a nervous smile. “If you’re a centimetre over or under you’re screwed.” His co-star Kirby Burgess nods. “It is an incredibly demanding ­moment. It is not just getting up there; it is holding it.” It’s Wednesday, 10.30am, and we are holed up in the bowels of Sydney’s Capitol Theatre with the cast of Dirty Dancing under the promise of learning the alchemy behind one of the most enduring pop-cultural moments of the 20th century: we are here to learn the lift. That memorable moment when Jennifer Grey leaps into the arms of Patrick Swayze at the dramatic denouement to Emile Ardolino’s 1987 film; the moment that would see Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes’s (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life win an Academy Award and secure its future as a karaoke classic; the moment that inspired a generation of would-be Johnnys and girls who just wanted to be his Baby. The time of my life has arrived. Or has it?

Show me a baby boomer who thinks Australian millennials are a bunch of self-interested slackers and I’ll show you Jennifer Rayner’s Generation Less. In her Redback Quarterly essay, the 29-year-old former federal political adviser urgently and articulately argues that young Australians are fast becoming the first generation since the Depression to be worse off than their parents. We’re underemployed or entering the workforce deeper in debt, worth less, underpaid and requiring bigger home loans, while being under-represented as voters and parliamentarians.

“Shake it, Helen,” one squawked manically at her friend as a muzak cover version of Shakira bounced around the Summer Hill Community Centre in Sydney. It was a Zumba class, a cocktail of Latin dance styles: mambo and merengue shaken with salsa and samba. With more than 12 million devotees, the Zumba trademark is the biggest branded fitness program in the world.