April 4, 2016
Dance is America
My wife and I have been going to dance competitions and multi-troupe performances for the past few years because our son and his partner are in various dance companies. This puts us into environments where we do not belong. It’s pretty awesome.
Dance is big in Boston. There are tons of groups, and when they get together they fill large auditoriums; a competition this weekend had about fifteen groups performing in front of a standing-room-only crowd of over 1,500.
And what audiences! They are beyond enthusiastic. They cheer on the teams at an astounding number of whoos per minute.
The teams are remarkable, and not just because of the high level of performance and choreography:
They are diverse in every direction: gender, race, sexual and gender identity, body type.
The dances are often gender indifferent in their choreography, although there are tropes that remain: men lift and catch women more than vice versa. Still, the women hit as hard as the men.
They are dancing to some of America’s cultural gifts: hiphop, jazz, show, and their mashups.
They have worked hard on a shared project with occasional star turns — the guy who can windmill, the woman who excels at pop and locking — but without stars.
You can be the oldest people in the audience, as my wife and I usually are, and be forgiven for thinking that no matter how cynical this generation may be, they are dancing the American dream.
