Rhinestone bras and short shorts.
People yelling "Work it, Girl."
Songs with lyrics being "beeped out."
Girls running their hand down their leg and puckering.
Am I at a Gentleman's (and I use the term loosely) Club? Nope. Sadly, I'm at a dance competition and the young girls in the routines described above are in the 13-14 year old category.
As a Christian dance studio owner and instructor, my heart breaks when I think of how much the dance world has changed over the past 26 years that I have been teaching - and not for the better, in my humble opinion. But, then I realize - it isn't just the dance world....it's the REAL world.
Our society is pushing harder and harder every day to make kids become something they're not: GROWN-UPS. As a dance instructor and studio owner, I have worked with students, 95% of whom were girls, since I was 15 years old and have seen the trends growing more and more towards a culture where it's acceptable to dress and dance provocatively - even as young as early elementary school age children. The choreography that would've made ANY audience blush 20 years ago now has parents cheering for their daughter and yelling things like "Work it girl!" and "Sexy!"
Let's just take that one last word, because I hear it a LOT in dance. Sexy. Thefreedictionary.com defines the word "sexy" this way:
sexy adj
1. provoking or intended to provoke sexual interest
2. feeling sexual interest; aroused
3. interesting, exciting, or trendy
Although I am strongly hoping that these dance parents, teachers and friends who are using this word in conjunction with their child are using the third definition, I question whether this REALLY IS a word that ANYONE would want used in the context of their child. Should we really hear dance teachers or audience members telling a young teen dancer to "make it sexy" as they perform? I hope MY dancers do NOT "make it sexy." We are there to dance, perform, entertain and (something different than many studios), glorify God in our performance.
Now, please don't shut me down and click to the next blog because I mentioned God in this blog. Although He is the center of my life, I am truly focusing on dance as an art form in a secular world for the purposes of this writing. Whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish another faith or absence of a faith, we MUST face the facts that we as a culture are sexualizing our children earlier and earlier. Do we celebrate abstinence anymore as a nation, or do we simply say it "isn't practical" and write it off as a thing of the past. Forget celebrating it, can we ACCEPT it as a choice that many people still choose and that's ok?!
I will close with a description of what I saw at one of the last dance competitions my students attended; incidentally, it was a part of this competition that made me feel a blog like this was necessary.
I feel the need to preface this, for the naysayers who will say this is just "sour grapes," with the fact that my girls are very successful at the competitions. Although competitions are not our main focus, we have won national titles, numerous 1st overalls, high scoring numbers, etc. This is NOT my attempt to make myself feel better about some loss, nor is this a chance to "toot our horn." I just want to clear up any misnomers that I have ulterior reasons to write this or am exaggerating.
In February of this year, we attended a popular competition that holds a "Dance Down" at each of their regional events. They market it as an audition class wherein dancers can learn a combination and audition for various scholarships in different venues. All of us (parents, teachers, etc) were allowed to stay in our seats in the audience for the entire audition, watching the dancers on the stage, and by the end, I almost cried. Not because my dancers did poorly - they actually did really well and several were semi-finalists. The choreography given to the dancers was fine as well - very good technical jazz steps with some challenging turns and leaps and very upbeat.
But before the combination, came the freestyle.
In the dance world, the word "freestyle" simply means improvisation, or "making it up as you go along." The dancers were asked to freestyle for the first section of the audition and were given free reign to do what came naturally, however, I was NOT prepared for what came naturally to many of these young dancers. There were a few boys doing hip-hop freestyle, but the young ladies vastly outnumbered the boys and it was many of their improvisational dance that shocked me to the core.
To watch these girls "move naturally" was so revealing of the environments they've had for dance, their choreographic experience, their role models, teachers and even their parenting. We watched as one girl licked herself, another girl was crawling on the stage edge and reaching out towards the judges very seductively. Still another girl was rubbing herself all over and gyrating in such a way that I truly began to question for WHAT these girls thought they were auditioning. I later found out that the last girl mentioned was 16 years old....and did end up winning one of the scholarships.
Why?
Why is this ok for our children?
For me, it is not. I have built my studio on the ideals that we will NOT exploit children, that we will NOT create dances that are "sexy" on our children and that lyrics, costuming, choreography and teachers as role models ALL shape the self esteem and general psyche of every child and should therefore be positive and age appropriate. They will have to be grown-ups soon enough. Let's let them be kids while they're kids!
My mother told me once that every pendulum swings all the way to one side before it comes back and eventually finds balance. We are that pendulum and our kids are the ones that are imbalanced.
Hope it swings back soon.
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