2013
With homecoming season in full swing, high schools across the country are paying close attention to popular trends that students might try to replicate on the dance floor. Twerking, a controversial move recently thrust into the spotlight by singer Miley Cyrus, is of particular concern, leading one Maryland school district to ban the practice outright. Capital Gazette reports:
Twerking is banned at South River High School’s homecoming, according to a dance contract. South River students and parents must both sign a contract warning that dirty dancers will be booted from the floor.
This year is the first that both Annapolis High School students and their parents have had to sign a similar contract. It prohibits making out, skimpy dresses, and simulated sex. Annapolis Principal Susan Chittim says the need to clean up the dance floor came before Cyrus’ romp. “This, unfortunately, has become the norm. Some of this crazy dancing that makes others feel uncomfortable,” Chittim said. “Some kids feel left out because of the dancing that occurs.”
Some Annapolis students, however, remain unconvinced dancing will change. “I guarantee we will see some twerking,” said senior Kate Gonsalves.
1871
The can-can, the now-iconic kick of nineteenth-century Parisian dance-halls, was not always looked upon so fondly. Composer Richard Wagner, bristling at the practice (and at comparisons to his own work), scornfully analyzes the dance's overt licentiousness:
I remember having seen a fairly intelligent writer in Paris fall into quite a temper at the Frenchman's treating his materialistic national dance with so much prudery, whilst our Grand Opera-ballets set the dances of all other nations before us with the greatest fidelity.
Unfortunately he omitted to notice that even in the most impassioned Spanish dance the wooing of love alone is symbolized, whereas in the Parisian cancan the immediate act of procreation is symbolically consummated.
How any artistic element can enter into the thing, seems difficult to comprehend; after the most loathsome kicks and bounds with which the Parisian celebrates the symbolic sacrifice to Venus, he steps back from the dance, conducts his partner to her seat with wellnigh old-French gallantry, and refreshes her with barley-water, just as though it were the most respectable of balls.