December 18, 2006
Dirty Dancing Posted by Ellen Feldman at 03:40 PM EST I was interested to read in this past Sunday’s New York Times that an increasing number of secondary schools across the country are banning “pornographic” dancing. The article quoted the principal of Fayetteville-Manlius High School, near Syracuse, New York, as saying, “If you watch this stuff, you end up seeing girls playing out, or being forced to play out, sexually submissive roles.”
While I do not consider myself a twenty-first-century Miss Grundy and rarely find myself on the same side of an issue as the religious right, which has also banned certain kinds of dancing in their schools, I could not help agreeing with the principal. Our sex-saturated society does not need grinding or freak dancing, as it is apparently called, on the gymnasium floor, or more peer pressure on young girls to behave in ways that make them uncomfortable. But the last line of the article forced me to question my own reaction. “I think it’s kind of ridiculous,” one 15-year-old boy at Fayetteville-Manlius said. “Our administration is refusing to change with the times.”
More than two hundred years ago, the waltz, from the old German walzen (to roll, turn, or glide), shocked European society. In place of polite lines of gentleman and ladies touching gloved hands gingerly while performing intricate steps, which required more memorization and concentration than passion, individual couples whirled around ballrooms in delicious intimacy. Bodies entwined, breath shortened, bosoms heaved, heads giddied. It is no accident that, at the count’s ball, Emma Bovary grows dizzy while waltzing.
According to eighteenth- and even nineteenth-century guardians of morality, the new dance threatened the very foundations of society. Religious leaders crusaded against it; most continental courts, with the exception of the Hapsburg, where it achieved some respectability, banned it; and the Times of London deplored it. In July 1816 the Prince Regent gave a ball at which guests danced the waltz. “The indecent foreign dance” scandalized the editors of that august paper. “So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society by the civil examples of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.” Eighteen years later, the waltz was danced for the first time in America, by, surprisingly, Bostonians, and pronounced “an indecorous exhibition.” See: www.centralhome.com/ballroomcountry/waltz.htm.
Perhaps every new craze shocks the generation that danced its precursor. The women who did the bunny-hug and turkey-trot outraged their waltzing parents, because while their feet took small steps, the rest of their bodies made the most of the music. The next generation raised their hems and kicked their rouged knees and gartered legs to the high heavens. By the time World War II convulsed society, jitterbuggers were performing acrobatic feats of wonder. In Kevin Baker’s brilliantly imagined novel Strivers Row, Malcolm Little, who will soon change his last name and history, goes to the Savoy Ballroom on his first night in Harlem to jump and spin and fly and throw his white dancing partner around in a scene that wows the crowd of onlookers, opens the protagonist’s eyes to a new world, and jumps off the page. I could go on through the twist and the frug and other fads that passed me by, but the story assumes a certain sameness.
Perhaps the 15-year-old high school student who complained about his elders refusing to change with the times was on to something. From primitive times, dancing has had a sexual connotation. I don’t want to get out on the floor and do these new dances. I don’t want young girls to be pressured into doing them. But neither history nor young people care what I think. They’re going to dance their seemingly salacious steps. And in 20 years, they’ll be trying to stop their children from doing the same, to a new beat.
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