On Dancing and The Saving Power of our Lord Jesus Christ

So, yesterday afternoon was the niece's dance recital.

She's four years old.

Sigh.

I've mentioned in the past that her mom, the husband's sister, is a wee bit out there when it comes to the religion business. I love my sister-in-law, but she and her husband have taken a somewhat reactionary point of view when it comes to all things religion. As in no one should read The DaVinci Code because it's full of "historical fallacies." Not that she read the book or anything and knows first hand, but because her pastor said so, so it must be true. She also homeschools their kids. This is fine and it, to a certain extent, works well for their kids, but one of the extracurricular activities the sister-in-law has set up for the niece, to meet and interact with kids her own age, is dance class.

At a "Christian" dance academy.

Now, you may very well be asking yourself, "What's a Christian dance academy?" Well, lemme tell you. It appears to be a dance academy where the teachers only use positive reinforcement to instruct the girls. There doesn't appear to be any "five, six, seven, eight, and shuffle,ball chain...no, stop the music. You're off, so and so. Get it right this time. Try and keep up," but rather, "Come on, girls, let's try that again and see if we can't start off on the right beat this time. Look to Jesus to help you with your timing." It's one where they spend time in class on Bible study, rather than, you know, dance lessons. And it appears to be one where they choose to spend time proselytizing during their recital.

Yep. That's right. We were asked to listen to the future son-in-law of the school owner (her daughter teaches at the school), who got up onstage in the middle of the recital and asked us---after a lengthy rambling about how wonderful Jesus was, how perhaps we thought we weren't worthy of His love, but that really we were, if only we could open our hearts to the Love of Jesus, all would be right in our lives---to bow our heads, close our eyes and pray with him. For about five minutes. Then, mercifully, God heard what we were really praying for, he left the stage and the recital continued.

And, gracious, what a recital it was! Well, not really. It was one of the sorriest excuses for a recital that I've ever seen. And I was at last year's, and this year's entry was barely better than that, so what does that tell you? Now, I can understand the wee bittie kids being off, and not really knowing what they're doing. I can understand that. That's typical and to be expected. But the older girls? And by that I mean girls age twelve and above? Hmmmm. If one of the reasons you put your kids in a dance academy is for them to learn, you know, how to dance, well, let's just say that if I had any girls, I wouldn't let them go anywhere near this academy. They just had no idea what the heck they were doing.

One of the things any of my music or acting teachers tried to instill in me and my cohorts was a sense of semi-professionalism when it came to going on stage. It didn't matter if you were in third grade or were a senior in high school: there were certain things you were supposed to do to make certain that the performance went off well and looked somewhat respectable. Once you were backstage, you stopped talking, because sounds carry in a theater. If you entered the stage from where the audience was sitting, you had to be extra vigilant, because you wanted them to be involved in the show and extra goofing off on your part would ruin it. You learned how to find the lights, and you stepped into them so that the audience could see you. You moved out of the way of the curtain. You even learned how to hold hands and bow simultaneously after the performance. We actually rehearsed this. All of these things weren't necessarily meant to add to the performance, but they were meant to ensure nothing was taken away from it.

Well, these people didn't care about any of this.

All of the girls, from every class, gathered in the audience before the recital. They were all carrying flowers to place at the base of a large wooden cross that was set at the back of the stage. In theory, this would have been cool and could have made a rather large impact, but it didn't. Because they brought the kids out five minutes before the performance was supposed to start and every dancer was chatting or twirling her hair or was jumping around excitedly. Then you had the idiot parents who needed to get just one more picture before the show started. No one tried to stop them and it just ruined the whole thing. Neither did these girls know how to position themselves on the stage, because apparently no one had told them how. So half the class was in light, half the class was in dark. All of the time. Half the class was scrunched up at one end of the stage with gaping holes in the middle, and a few dancers at the other end. Then there was the part where the teacher and owner of the school opened the curtain, stepped out and asked "Has anyone seen my granddaughter?" Because she was scheduled to go on right then and no one could find her. I should probably mention that this little girl was in the "Tippy Two's" class, which meant she was two-years-old. And, of course, all the numbers had these elaborate, posed finishes. Unfortunately, the effect was ruined because no one had, apparently, showed the dancers where to place themselves so the curtain could close.

Oy.

Then we had the actual class dances. And most of it choreographed to "Christian" music. I don't have a problem with Christian music per se. I'm not likely to listen to it, but hey, live and let live, right? Apparently that's not the case from the perspective of the Christian Dance School teacher. The teacher appropriated Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls of Fire," because she apparently liked the melody, but didn't like the lyrics, so she changed them to "Great Tongues of Fire." No credit was given in the program to Mr. Lewis, but credit was given to "Miss So and So" because apparently switching the lyrics around to suit her needs is more important than actually giving credit to the dude who wrote the song. I have a feeling this must be a habit in the Christian music industry: hoarking songs and then putting your own name on changes. Let's see there was an Ode to Joy, a Morning Has Broken a Stars and Stripes and a Everyday People, and the melodies were all as you would expect them to be, but not only had some of the lyrics (if there were lyrics) had been changed around, none of the names you'd normally associate with those songs were listed. I mean, I can understand about Cat Stevens, but really, not to give Sousa a wee bit of credit is really tacky.

Anyway, the few dances that weren't choreographed to Christian music, well, those were the Daddy/Daughter dances. Have you seen heard about these? A girl and her Dad attend class together and then, at the recital, they perform together. Which is a pretty nice thing, but whereas at last year's recital there was one Daddy/Daughter dance, this time around there were FOUR! Count 'em, FOUR! Two were set to music from the fifties, one from the sixties, and one, of course, was from the seventies. I felt so sorry for the guys who had to participate in the seventies dance because of their costumes: white tuxedos, with white patent leather tap shoes. Of course they had to dance around to the Bee Gees' Staying Alive. Oy.

There was also one Mother/Daughter dance and this one was a pip! It was partially set to "You Can't Hurry Love" by the Supremes. The mothers wagged their fingers at the girls and told them "you just have to wait." Ok. This was fine, in and of itself, but the song they mixed it with was called "Average Girl" by The Barlow Girls. I don't remember the exact lyrics to this song, but they went on about how I'm not going to spend my time chasing boys because I'm an average girl, yadda, yadda, yadda, then came the crescendo. Obviously, you knew it was coming, but the message one expected to recieve, that girls had better things to do than chase boys, that you didn't need to chase boys because life was about more than chasing boys, was not the message one received in actuality: these girls weren't going to chase boys because---ahem---THEY WERE WAITING FOR A WEDDING RING! This was dramatized with the girls holding up their left hands and waving them around.

Oooooooooo-kay then.

The niece did fairly well, considering her age, and we were quite proud of her, but the husband, who is our resident agnostic, was squirming in his seat when he heard the chorus to the song she was pirouetting to: I wanna be a sheep. I looked over at him and his eyes went wide. Of course this was a reference to Jesus being the shepherd, and we make up His flock, but the husband, of course, didn't see it this way. He saw "being a sheep" as a bad thing, because it meant you were blindly following rather than leading. As you might imagine, the husband just about lost it when the dude got up and started proselytizing. I was sitting between the husband and his sister. I could feel him vibrating because of what was happening. I could feel her squiming because she knew what the husband would be thinking about all of this. It was quite humorous, on the whole. The sister and brother in law both made a big show of apologizing for the incident after all was said and done, that it had made even them uncomfortable, but I didn't think they needed to bother: it wasn't their fault, and, quite frankly, I thought it was the best part of the whole recital because it was so funny.

Oh, and have I mentioned the costumes yet? I don't think I have. See, at a Christian dance academy modesty is prized above all else. No one over the age of two is hopping around in a tutu at the recital because a tutu is too revealing. Never mind that the owner was running around in a tight tank top and a pair of capris. Or that her daughters, her assistants, when they did their dances, were in skin-tight leotards, That's really not relevant. There's a different standard for the students. All the pretty ballerinas were in long skirts, most of them made of tulle, and tulle alone, but the girls in the pointe class actually had some fabric attached to their skirts. Because, God knows, we wouldn't want a ballerina to have to bare some leg. While the skirts are pretty, they really don't do much for some of the girls. Sigh. Since this is a "Christian" dance academy, well, it appears they'll take pretty much anyone. This becomes more apparent when you get to the older students and it becomes obvious these are the students that the other schools encourage to quit, because they can't keep up. And some of them are---and how do I put this kindly because, really, it's not their fault---rather heavyset. So, you have lovely modest costumes that, on occasion, can be quite pretty, yet you have them on heavyset young women, which produces the unfortunate effect of reminding certain members of the audience, namely me, of the dancing hippos from Fantasia when they leap and bound across the stage.

Then you have the costumes where it looks like in their rush to create modest costumes, someone forgot that these girls have to actually, you know, move around in them. Long flared pants that could cause someone to trip when they're tapping around. Scratchy, cheapola tulle that snags on tights and clings to it, hampering movement. Oversized costumes for the hip-hop class that the girls spent more time shoving out of the way than actually dancing.

I've rambled on long enough about this, but there's one thing I left out: the dancing. It was awful. The little kids, well, that's understandable. But the older ones? Aiyiyi. I have no idea why anyone would send their kid to this school, Christian Dance Academy or not, because it appears that these students are not receiving primo instruction, ya dig? The kids tried, but they just couldn't pull it off. I place the blame solely at the instructors' feet: dance requires discipline and there's no discipline at that school. None. Nada. Zip. Zero. Zilch. I have the awful feeling that some of the older girls will go on to audition for productions maybe at their schools or for other community activities, they will put down that they've been in dance for x number of years, at this school, thinking this is a plus for them, and they will not understand why they weren't given the gig. Which, to my mind, is much more cruel than telling someone the truth: that they're not very good, that they wasted their time and their parents' money, they have little to no technical skill, and no professionalism whatsoever.

But that isn't, apparently, a very "Christian" thing to do.

Posted by Kathy at June 6, 2005 11:53 PM