High School Dances: Not about Pairing Up Anymore

As part of my ongoing campaign to research what I'm writing about, I went to a dance at our local high school last night. (I've been thinking that it would be entertaining to write about how a budding teenage empath deals with all the emotions he might pick up at a dance.) It was illuminating. And requires me now to rewrite several scenes I had already written, but I suppose that just demonstrates the necessity of the research…

I should start by explaining that even though I have two children who have attended high school (one now a college student, the other currently a high school junior), neither has shown the slightest interest in attending school dances. Keep in mind as well that I'm pretty much a popular culture illiterate. I did attend some dances back when I was a teenager (kind of hard to avoid when you're the student body president), but that was (gulp) 35 years ago in an extremely small, extremely rural school district in eastern Oregon. In short, about as different as could be from the way things are in a suburban midwestern high school of today — more different, it turns out, than even I had expected.

I had previously found a cultural informant: the daughter of some friends of ours, now in her mid-twenties, who went to dances when she attended the local high school. Her description was helpful, but I thought it be good to see things firsthand. So I wound up talking to the school volunteer coordinator about helping out with the winter carnival dance. She had me fill out some forms — including one for running a background check that I found comforting in a protect-our-children sort of way — and told me when and where to show up.

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I went early, on the theory that I might be able to help with setup. It turned out not to be necessary, as the teachers on duty clearly had everything well under control. On the other hand, I got to observe the last half-hour or so of what even I thought was a very exciting basketball game, which our local team won in double overtime. Go Wildcats!

Things started as people were streaming out the gym through the Commons area where the dance was going to be held. One end had been cleared of tables, and equipment (lights and speakers) had been set up there. As best I could tell, the music was all done by students on a volunteer basis. I think the set list had been pretty much decided in advance.

Lines were set up to process students. The fee was $3 each, which I was informed went to the student council and helped pay for scholarships. It was basically run by students, overseen by faculty members (with a friendly police liaison officer very much in evidence). I hovered at first in the area where students were being admitted, basically to be another adult presence, though I doubt I would have known if someone was doing something he or she shouldn't — a statement that pretty much summarizes my role throughout the evening. As the dance was getting ready to start, students were also still selling soft drinks in a vending area. Later, they sold pizza-by-the-slice further toward the back: again, basically run by students under teacher supervision.

And then the dancing started. I'm not any good with numbers, but I figure there were maybe 50-100 kids there, which I think is pretty good for our school. (I just went online to try to get enrollment figures, but failed.)

From the beginning, things were different from what I was expecting. Students crowded up toward the front in large groups: boys with girls, boys with boys, girls with girls, in ways that seemed to have very little to do with romantic pairings. There was a lot of hopping, jumping, and waving of arms. It kind of looked like what I've heard about mosh pits, except not nearly as squished together as real mosh pits must be. The music was loud and heavily techno/rap-influenced, as best I could tell (what do I know about popular music?). The whole thing was a lot more athletic than erotic.

And that's the way it continued. With the exception of the slow dances — of which there were maybe three, in the two hours I was there — kids weren't dancing as couples. The slow dances were much the way I remember, with boys and girls wrapping their arms around each other and swaying side to side, kind-of in time to the music. That part of the evening seemed strangely like an afterthought, though. Most of the time, there was more couple action at the tables than in the dance area: kids cuddling or talking, but nothing more than what you'd see during lunchtime at a typical school, I expect.

Eventually it occurred to me that unlike high school dances of my time, what I was seeing wasn't about pairing up romantically. Guys weren't asking girls out onto the dance floor (or vice versa). Teen hormones were clearly in evidence, but they had to do more with working out energy with other teens in creative ways than with checking each other out. Frankly, I've been to science fiction club meetings with more romantic tension than I saw out on the dance floor last night. In short, the evening really wasn't about courting (or pre-courting) behavior — at least not any more than all teen interactions are about that. That's a major change from the dances of my youth: both those I remember and everything I've heard reported by contemporaries.

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The other thing I noticed is harder to characterize. I want to give it a try, though, because in some ways it represents just as fundamental a shift as the first, or perhaps the same fundamental shift as the first.

The teen years, from what I've observed, are often characterized by a kind of awkward earnestness, doing its best to camouflage itself behind a mask of attempted irony and misdirection. Social acceptance is often literally a matter of survival. Teens do their best to hide that vulnerability by pretending that what they're doing and the reactions they get from both peers and adults don't really matter to them.

What I saw at last night's dance was a bit like that, except less serious. The kids at the dance mostly really didn't care about what they were doing, except as a way to have fun. It was all a kind a tongue-in-cheek performance to them, whether what they were imitating was dirty dancing, disco, or swing (all of which you might see at any given time). They were essentially all goofing off, in a way that was social while at the same time highly individualistic.

(I should also comment here about the variety in dress, which ranged from jeans and t-shirts to cocktail dresses and mini-skirts, to button-up shirts and even a few ties. All evidently part of whatever performance the person wanted to enact. One kid I saw was wearing a pair of truly horrendous early-60s-geek-style glasses with huge plastic frames. I wondered at first if fashion had taken another truly unfortunate swing of the pendulum, but later decided that it was probably a bit of deliberate parody. Or maybe not. Who am I to know?)

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So what do I make of all this?

It's easy to overgeneralize. Teen behavior, for all that we talk about the universal impact of the Internet, tends to manifest within often highly idiosyncratic microcultures — a fancy way of saying that my local high school may simply be weird. And I'm sure there's a lot I missed, or misinterpreted, or misapplied based on an inadequate sampling (or too much attachment to an elegant hypothesis). And yet… Results of direct observation certainly shouldn't be dismissed. There's something immensely powerful about firsthand perceptions, especially when it comes to informing fiction, which is always inevitably about the particular as opposed to the general.

From a broad cultural perspective, I can't help but think about how this calls into question the common wisdom about dances as a venue for dating and pre-dating experience. I'm sure dances can still serve that purpose, especially in settings like the Mormon church where expectations are colored by what the Old Folks say. But if what I saw is representative, we're swimming against the tide on this one. Asserting that this isn't the way dances ought to be risks making our advice irrelevant and/or confusing. Do we really have any right to insist that our children adhere not just to our values, but also to the culture of our youth? That's a losing battle. Teens, by definition, own teen culture. I suspect attempts to change that are ultimately doomed to failure.

Which is more than enough pontificating based on a scant two hours of time done at a high school dance. I'm off now to attend a rocket launching sponsored by the Minnesota Amateur Spacemodeler Association…