Lately I think my life is just a serious of Eye Opening Experiences.
This weekend my niece competed at a regional dance conference and being a dutiful Aunt and Uncle (and baby cousin) we showed up to cheer her on.
Holy cow. Talk about a different world! Hundreds and hundreds of teenage dancers in their teenage dancer clothes and teenage dancer hair and teenage dancer stage make-up talking their teenage dancer talk and walking their peculiarly teenage dancer walk. And don’t get me started on the stage mothers. Have we learned nothing from Jon-Benet? Yikes. It was a fearful environment for two fish-out-of-water as we.
The competition itself was a series of dances numbers performed by groups from around the midwest (and Mexico) kept to a strict schedule… for 12 flipping hours. The judges, I can only presume, wore catheters.
Robby, the bambino, and I had gone out into the wintery Chicago day to explore the Shedd Aquarium (Jack loves fish) and Marshall Fields (Mommy likes department stores) and a new-to-us Japanese restaurant where we lapped up Miso soup and plates of wee little foods. When we returned the competion was about two-thirds through the night leaving us with the last five hours to wait to see our girl who was very near the end.
Our experience in the World of Dance Class Land isn’t much… just the last 9 years or so of watching our girls flit and float and fleetly fly in a succession of tutus and costumes. One of their Other Aunts runs the studio– and brings to it her professional dancing back ground but also a nuturing nature. I never appreciated that fully until the second hour of the other night and realizing how sheltered their dancing lives have been. Their costumes, music and choreography have always been tasteful and, most importantly, appropriate to their ages. No 11 year old should be thrusting her pelvis to any beat– and in their studio even the oldest girls are elegant and poised in the jazz and hiphop numbers.
Not so much for 80% of the other competitors we saw. YI-IKES. Sometimes it was the costumes– barely there bits of lace and implied lingerie. Other times it was the music that had us asking, “Did we just hear them say….?” One group featured a boy that bore down on a group of girls in a choreographed ode to sexual violation that had my sister and I, in unison, chirping, “Get thee behind me Satan you have no power here” as only two Once Baptist girls can do.
I’m no prude. But really, does anyone want to see their still chubby 13 year old, her baby fat still creating little rolls around her middle, her braces gleaming in the stage lights, reach for her crotch? Ick. If I wanted to watch Cinemax I’d have stayed in the room.
The next day was a whole other dynamic. A room of a hundred and so young women auditioning for dance scholarships. My nieces and their pals were still bleary eyed from the late night before. (They got about 4 hours of sleep– no giggling or girly silliness… just exhaustion from a post midnight slot in the competition.) They sat in a little knot of familiarity blinking at the early hour and quietly stretching in an on-auto-pilot way. Near them a few girls with more experience and a few years twirled and leaped and plied in a way that exuded confidence. Sitting there at age 35, with too much weight on my bones, and no toe shoes in my past I could still see that the confidence of these midriff baring girls was entirely false. They are the girls that zoomed through their teenage years in high gear and did things that awarded them temporary wisdom in the moment and wrinklier, too heavily made-up faces in the long run. You remember the type. It’s easy to spot it now at 35. At 12 it was still impossible. So I watched the body posture of the girls I love shrink down into themselves while they, out of the corner of their eyes, caught every shrill giggle and every pirouette from the Future Stage Mothers. At first I ached for my girls and then it ticked me off that their assured stretching would be reduced to nearly nothing for the sake of these few Twirling Divas.
Being a teenage girl is rough enough without a preening type flipping her long hair around. My Dad would have told them to “Kick butt and take names” and my sister, in fact, did just that. As for me? I’m banking on the expectation that my girls know who they are and that, when they dance, it is an extension of a secure place of knowing that they are hard working, talented, beautiful, intelligent, kind hearted, and well-traveled young women. That the joy they have in dancing is a continuation of the joy they have in living.
And thank God for their Other Aunt who has taught them to shine in the studio no less brightly than they shine in the glow of the footlights. And to truly value their bodies for what they have trained them to do– not to sell themselves short with the crude grinding of their peers.
Again. Ick.
commonterri 