Out of Line

 Do you believe that dance is an art or a sport?

This is a burning issue in my house. My younger daughter, S, has been dancing for ten years. There is no doubt she trains rigorously for her dance classes, certainly as much as her older sister, who runs cross country, does. She argues with me frequently that the physical demands and athleticism that dance requires make it like a sport. She also points out that dance competitions are a frequent obligation of many dance schools, although she does not participate in competitive dance. Her dance school, which trains in classic ballet, jazz, and tap, has recently added a competition team program to remain, well, competitive in the field of dance. The components of a sport are definitely present at her level of dance education.

I still maintain that dance is not a sport; it is an art. While sports require skill, and some athletes have a natural ability or talent that others do not possess, sports are still only what they are, a physical recreational past time. Sports require training and sometimes team work. They require commitment and practice. They do not, however, require an artistic element.

Football, like soccer or baseball or kickball or basketball, is just a sport. You have a series of plays. You root for your team. You get angry with bad calls, frustrated with fumbles or turnovers or missed shots, and elated with victories. You feel a range of emotions. Yet, nothing is expressed.

Dance, on the other hand, requires the same level of discipline and practice and arduous training, but with great technical skill, control, and grace, plus you have to look good while doing it. You aren’t just going through the motions to get from point A to point B, or to score points. Your goal is to evoke, both in yourself and in the audience, a level of emotion, of thought, of an idea or a story, all without words. It takes a physical activity to a higher place.

Sports are on the ground, and dance floats high above the canopy of treetops.

Which is why I am still surprised that our school system devotes an entire learning unit of physical education, PE class, to dance.

When my daughters were in elementary school, they did a unit on square dancing. Hell, I remember doing the same when I was in school many moons ago, and I hated it then just as much as they did a few years ago. That awkward pairing of boys and girls, the sweaty hands, the trampled feet, the horrible country music. All of it combined to make two weeks of PE torture, although looking back, it was still better than the running that induced asthma or the gymnastics that caused me to hit my head on the ground doing a backward summersault. To this day, I have never been able to do a cartwheel or tolerate country music, nor have my children. I blame PE classes.

But enough about hating PE, because who didn’t, really? I want to get back to the dance in PE thing. S, this dancing daughter of mine, just finished her dance unit in her PE class. Unlike the square dancing of elementary school, middle school requires line dancing and choreography, which I think is in part so the boys and girls don’t actually touch each other. The kids were divided into groups and had to work out a dance routine with different components, like turns and switching places and stuff. They had to be coordinated enough to remember their routine and do it in sync. It took a solid week to work out the dance choreography and practice it before they were to perform in front of entire class, thus leveling the playing field, so to speak, with an equal dose of public humiliation.

I asked my daughter how her dance went, and she felt her group did pretty good. She said they danced to a song by Foster the People called “Pumped up Kicks.” Some of you might know this song, but for those of you who don’t, it’s about a troubled kid who wants to hurt other people, perhaps his classmates. Some of the lyrics include “you better, run, baby, run, faster than my bullet”, "He's coming for you", and “outrun my gun”, making it an odd choice for a middle school class.

I was a little surprised and asked who picked the song and she told me the teachers did. I also wanted to know if it was a clean version. Sometimes a song is released with the original words and then in a clean version with the objectionable parts either played in reverse or replaced by a sound effect  or just left blank, leaving the listener to imagine what word they just missed. S told me it wasn’t the clean version, but the real one, the one all about an unhappy youth shooting other people in cold blood, the kind of thing that a middle school would normally frown upon.

Some of the other song choices included popular hits by Pharell Williams, Taylor Swift, and Ariana Grande. They even had a relatively old hit by ‘NSync. All of those songs were about being happy or self-reliant after a bad relationship, but they still maintained a degree of hope and positivity. Or the kids could opt to dance to a song about teenage revenge killings.

S’s group originally picked “Pumped up Kicks” because it has a good beat and is edgy, but they decided at the last minute they wanted to switch to a different, newer song. The PE teacher told them it was too late to change songs, so they had to dance to the gun violence song. Makes sense to me.

I doubt that anyone was inspired to commit violence because of that song, but what if S’s group decided to make little finger guns in their line dance? Would they be faced with a zero tolerance policy and possible expulsion? Did the teachers even listen to the song lyrics?

It’s not really ironic, but it is Alanis Morissette ironic. It is a bit like a black fly in your chardonnay, don’t you think?