Return of the Solid Gold Dancers

Have you been to a dance recital recently? No? Well, I have, and I must say, this ain’t your sister’s dance recital. Unless your sister is a stripper, in which case, my apologies. I don’t know if strippers have a dance school, but if they did, then I think I accidentally enrolled my seven year old there. Luckily, she was only taking a ballet class. It is kind of hard to make ballet whorish. Unfortunately, the opposite is true for most of the rest of dance numbers I saw that night.

The theme of the evening was “Rock Star,” which meant that the audience wished for ear plugs and blinders to make it through the two and a half hours of bad classic rock remakes and hip gyrations of the underage dancers. The dance studio that staged this alleged performance teaches dance from preschool to high school, and they cover ballet, jazz, tap, and hip hop. Keep in mind that the majority of their students are upper middle class and white, so you wouldn’t imagine a big need for hip hop lessons, but apparently all the cool kids are doing it.

And while the dance studio makes dance fun for its youngest students, it really concentrates on its competing dance teams, their bread and butter. Once a girl reaches grade school, she can try out for a variety of different teams, which drive around the region competing in dance offs, but not like in Grease or West Side Story. I hear it’s great fun for the girls, the spirit of competition, the importance of being part of a team, the sense of pride and responsibility, blah blah blah. For the mothers, it is a big pain in the gluteus, all the driving around, the cost of the costumes, the constant gelling of fly-away hair. So my daughter isn’t on a dance team, because there’s no way in hell I am going to do that. But come recital night, 23 of the 48 (yes, I said 48) dance numbers are from the competing dance teams, and we all have to sit through it. There is no leaving early, unless you can convince your young children they don’t really want to wait for their turn to walk across the stage in front of all the parents to get their trophy.

Now, I had no complaints with the preschool dance numbers. There is nothing cuter than a little row of mini girls in Shirley Temple dresses trying to tap their toes without falling over. Usually one kid per preschool dance number had to be carried on the stage, and would stand still, staring at the instructor off stage, as lost as if she had never had nine months of dance classes to learn the three steps the rest of the girls repeated over and over . The audience laughed delightedly, and the little girls onstage knew they were being laughed at, saving up the experience for therapy in thirty years.

Then there were the dancers my daughter’s age. These were classified as beginner classes, and involved maybe five of the performances. Each of them numbered over fifteen girls who would come out and perform rudimentary dance moves, ballet, tap, or jazz. There wasn’t much to report about them because they were what you would expect for girls learning dance. Nothing fancy, nothing special, but a chance to shine on a big stage in a pretty dress with too much of mother’s makeup smeared all over their faces.

But the reason that the fathers all stayed awake for the recital were the teenagers, especially the dance team members. There might have been one or two girls who were almost legal, but you couldn’t tell by their used up faces, scantily clad bodies, and erection causing moves. I don’t think a single one of them hid their navels, but perhaps we should all be thankful they removed their piercings for the dance numbers.

The tap dance numbers confused me, but I guess I am not up on my tap dance. Since when did it get so angry? There was as much chin jutting and foot slamming as there was tap tapping. I guess when tap shifted from Sammy Davis Jr. to Savion Glover, it became an urban form of dance, which was in turn bastardized by suburban dance studios across the country. That meant we were treated to tap dance smack downs, complete with Unabomber hoodies, which somehow still revealed a lot of midriff.

There were a few contemporary dance numbers as well, with their flowing garments, although I am pretty sure one performance was in pajamas. Nubile teens in pjs just cranked up the male audience fantasy factor, with all that rolling around on the floor in wife beaters and plaid flannel bottoms. the rest of the contemporary dance numbers involved classic rock songs with a new age-y feel, while the girls draped themselves around each other and turned themselves inside out. I can’t watch contemporary dance without thinking about buying a douche or changing my tampon. They are the stuff feminine hygiene ads are made of.

My favorite part of the recital, however, were the jazz numbers. Jazz used to mean Liza Minnelli and fishnet stockings, maybe a top hat and the obligatory jazz hands. Now it is lap dancing without the lap. There was actually one number that involved chairs, so you could really imagine what these girls will do in a year or two when they flunk out of technical college. Lots of squatting with knees spread wide. Splits. Lots of splits. With and without arched backs. I am pretty sure I saw outer labia during one performance. “Duck,” I said to my husband, “you’re gonna get hit with a ping pong ball.”

That dance recital was an evening to remember. Which is why I enrolled my daughter in a new dance school for this fall. Now her teacher’s’ credentials involve which theater she performed with instead of being the winner of the 24-K Klub wet t-shirt amateur night. I have already been to the open house, and I didn’t see a single belly button. I am looking forward to a tasteful and age appropriate dance recital, one where girls are judged by their dance skills and not how their abs look when oiled and glittered. But we all know it will be a big snooze. I have been meaning to catch up on my sleep anyway.