Why I Think Dance Should Be Mandatory in High School

 

I think dancing should be a mandatory class in every high school.

I know. Mandatory is a strong word. But hear me out.

We make kids take PE because physical activity is important. We expose them to music and art because creativity is important. We want them to learn how to work with other people, build confidence, deal with failure and hopefully find things they enjoy outside of staring at a screen.

Dance does all of these things.

I've spent ten years doing competitive and showcase ballroom dancing, and somewhere along the way dance stopped being just a hobby for me. It changed my body. It changed the way I handle failure. It changed the way I learn. It gave me a way to deal with stress. It gave me friendships, competition, connection and some really lovely memories.

So yes. I think everyone should at least have to try it.

Let's start with the obvious: dance gets you moving

Dance is physical activity.

We spend an enormous amount of our lives sitting—at desks, in cars, on couches and, increasingly, in front of screens. Dance gets you off the chair and makes you move.

And it doesn't necessarily feel like exercise.

You're listening to music. You're learning something. You're trying to remember what your feet are supposed to be doing. You're dancing with someone. Meanwhile you're working on balance, coordination, flexibility, stamina and strength.

This matters because not everyone likes traditional sports.

Someone might hate running and love salsa. Someone who has absolutely no interest in basketball might discover ballroom. Someone else might love hip-hop, Bollywood, ballet, contemporary, swing, tap or something completely different.

There are so many forms of dance that I have a hard time believing there isn't something out there for almost everyone.

And some of the physical benefits sneak up on you.

My mom thought I had gotten taller

One of the biggest physical changes dance made to my body was my posture.

A few years ago, I was visiting my mom in India and she looked at me and said that I looked taller.

I hadn't gotten taller.

What had changed was the way I was carrying myself.

In ballroom, we spend an almost ridiculous amount of time thinking about posture and creating long lines through the body. You are stretching upward while grounding downward. You think about your spine, your frame, your shoulders, your feet and where your weight is.

If you looked at pictures of me from ten years ago, you would often see my shoulders practically up in the sky.

Years of Standard ballroom exercises trained me to bring them back down into a much more natural position. At first, I had to think about it.

Eventually, I stopped thinking about it.

My body just learned.

My feet are another example. I have flat feet, and my weight naturally tends to move toward the outside of my feet. Dance has made me much more aware of where my weight actually is and how I'm using my feet. One of my dance teachers once talked about how useful Latin footwork can be for developing the way we use our feet and carry the rest of the body.

That's one of the things I find fascinating about dance.

You aren't just learning steps.

You're learning how your own body works.

And apparently sometimes you learn it well enough that your mother thinks you've grown taller.

Dance is also my reset button

There is another benefit that is harder to measure but, for me, is probably even more important.

I don't think I have ever regretted going to a dance class.

I can be stressed out after work. I go to dance class and come out happier.

I can be sad because I'm missing my parents. I go to dance class and come out happier.

I can be irritated, mentally exhausted or stuck in my own head.

Then I dance.

And somehow I feel better.

Maybe it's the physical activity. Maybe it's the music. Maybe it's being around people. Maybe it's having to concentrate so intensely on something that has absolutely nothing to do with whatever was bothering me.

Probably all of the above.

I don't really care.

It works.

For an hour, my brain has another job.

Where are my feet?

What is my posture doing?

Am I on time?

What is my partner doing?

Why did I just mess up that turn AGAIN?

There isn't much room left for whatever annoyed me at work at 4 PM.

Dance has become one of the ways I reset myself.

Teenagers need things like that too.

Dance teaches you how to be around other people

Dance can be incredibly social.

You can dance with friends, family members, classmates, romantic partners or someone you met five minutes ago at a dance social.

Partner dancing in particular teaches you to pay attention to another person.

You learn to lead.

You learn to follow.

You learn that doing your part correctly isn't enough. You have to notice what the other person is doing too.

You also learn about personal space, appropriate touch, consent and boundaries.

A good partner isn't just thinking, Look how well I can dance.

They're paying attention to the experience of the person dancing with them.

And there is something really nice about connecting with another human being without a screen between you.

I wish dancing were just... normal again

Sometimes I'm jealous of people who lived in a time when social dancing was simply an ordinary part of community life.

To be clear, I don't actually want to live in 18th-century England.

I enjoy antibiotics, indoor plumbing and having rights far too much for that.

But I am jealous of one thing.

People danced.

There were assemblies, balls, country dances and other social occasions where people gathered and dancing was simply one of the things you did together.

I'm not romanticizing those societies. Class mattered. Money mattered. Gender mattered. Courtship certainly mattered.

But I love the underlying idea that knowing how to dance was a normal social skill.

I feel like we've lost some of that.

We still have formal balls, including debutante balls, but those often feel to me more like ceremonial echoes of an older tradition than places where ordinary young people regularly go because dancing together is fun.

We have nightclubs. And there are wonderful dance clubs and social dance communities where people genuinely love dancing.

But modern nightlife also frequently mixes dancing with dating, flirting and hooking up.

I've experienced that personally.

There have been times when I've danced with men in classes or at dance clubs believing we were both there because we enjoyed dancing, only to realize that the person dancing with me wasn't particularly interested in the dancing at all.

He was interested in picking me up.

That made me uncomfortable.

It also made me sad.

Because I wanted the dance.

I wanted to figure out how two people could move together to the music. I wanted to follow an interesting lead. I wanted to play with timing and musicality. I wanted that wonderful feeling you occasionally get when you dance with someone you've never danced with before and, somehow, for the length of one song, the two of you figure each other out.

And then the song ends.

You say, "Thank you."

And that's it.

That interaction can be complete all by itself.

A dance doesn't have to be an audition for anything that happens afterward.

Experiences where that boundary became blurred eventually contributed to me walking away from Argentine Tango and Kizomba.

And that genuinely bothers me, because those are beautiful dances.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we grew up treating social dancing as something completely normal.

Imagine if boys and girls learned when they were young that you can hold another person's hand, dance together for three minutes, have a wonderful time and then simply say thank you.

Imagine if asking someone to dance could just mean:

"Would you like to dance?"

Nothing more.

Maybe if we taught dancing as a normal social activity when people were young, we'd produce more adults who felt comfortable dancing simply for the pleasure of dancing.

I don't actually want to go back to the 18th century.

But I'd happily steal that idea from them.

Bring back the community dance.

No corset required.

And sometimes a dance is romantic

Now, after everything I just said, I don't want to give the impression that I think romance and dancing shouldn't mix.

Quite the opposite.

One of my favorite memories with my boyfriend happened completely spontaneously.

We were staying in a vacation rental, listening to music we both enjoyed and, at some point, we just started dancing together.

It wasn't planned.

There was no dance floor.

There was no audience.

And he's not the world's greatest dancer. (Sorry.)

None of that mattered.

We were moving together to music we both loved, and it felt lovely.

That's it. That's the memory.

And yet I remember it.

Honestly, if my significant other planned a date where the entire plan was, Tonight we're going to put on music we love and dance together for an hour, I would absolutely love it.

Because there is a particular kind of intimacy in dancing with someone you love.

You're close to each other. You're listening to the same music. You're paying attention to each other's movements. You're communicating without necessarily talking.

And you don't need reservations.

You don't need an expensive restaurant.

You don't even need to leave the living room.

I once dated someone who knew the basics of Argentine Tango, and I loved that we could simply dance together in his living room.

That relationship didn't survive.

But if it had, we could have had many more evenings dancing in that living room. :)

Maybe that's another reason I want people to learn to dance when they're young.

Dance is a skill you can give to your future relationships.

Someday you might use it at your wedding. Or at someone else's wedding. Or on a carefully planned date.

Or maybe, twenty years from now, your favorite song will unexpectedly start playing while you're making dinner.

You'll look at the person you love.

They'll look at you.

And instead of just listening to the song, you'll know how to reach for them and move together.

Not particularly well, perhaps.

But who cares?

Sometimes dancing isn't about technique at all.

Sometimes it's simply another way of saying:

I'm here. You're here. I love this song. Come dance with me.

Dance can be artistic, spiritual—or ridiculously technical

Another reason I love dance is that people can love it for completely different reasons.

For some people, dancing is emotional or spiritual. Movement gives them a way to express something they don't necessarily know how to put into words.

For other people, dance is technical.

I am very familiar with this side.

You can spend an absurd amount of time thinking about posture, footwork, frame, timing, alignment, balance, musicality and exactly which part of your foot should be touching the floor at a particular moment.

And then you can practice it approximately 700 times.

If you're competitive, you can compete.

If you're artistic, you can perform.

If you want to dance socially, you can dance socially.

If you just want to put music on and move because it makes you happy, that counts too.

Dance can be sport.

It can be art.

It can be social.

It can be technical.

It can be emotional.

It can be spiritual.

There isn't one correct reason to dance.

Dance is also culture

Dance is one of those wonderful things where learning it can introduce you to a culture without the experience feeling like a history lesson.

Think about salsa, tango, kathak, bharatanatyam, flamenco, swing, Irish dance, hip-hop, Bollywood and the countless folk dances around the world.

They came from somewhere.

They developed within particular communities, histories and musical traditions.

A school dance program could expose kids to all kinds of cultures through something they actually get to participate in.

And I wouldn't want a high-school dance class to teach only one style. That's exactly the opposite of what I'm arguing for.

Give them a taste of everything.

Let them figure out what they like.

But the biggest thing dance taught me was how to fail

This might actually be the most important thing I've learned from ten years of dancing.

Dance taught me that failure is a feedback loop.

I didn't always think this way.

When something went wrong, it was very easy to make the failure about me.

I wasn't good enough.

I should have done better.

I messed it up.

But you cannot survive very long as a serious dancer if every mistake becomes an existential crisis.

Because you are going to make a LOT of mistakes.

Eventually, I started treating failures more like data points.

Something didn't work.

Okay.

Why?

When did it go wrong?

Where did it go wrong?

Was it my timing? My balance? My footwork? Did I misunderstand what I was supposed to do? Did I simply not practice it enough?

What can I change next time?

That sounds like such a simple shift, but it changed something fundamental in the way I think.

I stopped focusing so much on being perfect.

More importantly, I stopped blaming myself every time something went wrong.

There is a big difference between:

"I failed. Something is wrong with me."

and

"That failed. What happened?"

The second one gives me something useful to do.

I can investigate it.

I can change something.

I can try again.

And once I started doing that, a lot of the negative emotion surrounding failure disappeared. I had somewhere else to put that energy: into getting better.

The funny thing is that learning to accept failure made me a better dancer.

And then, without really intending it, I started applying the same approach to the rest of my life.

I care much more now about how I talk to myself. I pay attention to what is going through my head when something goes wrong, because self-talk matters.

I don't need to be perfect.

I need to keep improving.

I genuinely don't think I would have learned that lesson in quite the same way without dance.

Dance also taught me that my brain can handle more than I thought

The second big lesson was about learning itself.

Think about everything your brain might be doing while ballroom dancing.

Where are my feet?

What is my posture doing?

Is my frame correct?

Am I on time?

What is the music doing?

What is my partner doing?

Where are the other couples on the floor?

What's the next figure?

Oh, and preferably smile and look like you're enjoying yourself while doing all of this.

When you are starting out, it seems impossible.

Then something interesting happens.

Your brain starts making associations. Certain things become automatic. One concept connects to another. Eventually something that originally felt like ten separate instructions becomes one thing you simply know how to do.

That experience changed the way I approach learning outside dance.

I learned that complicated things don't necessarily need to stay complicated. I can break them into small pieces, keep those pieces simple, build associations between them and gradually put them together.

I've even noticed that switching between completely unrelated subjects sometimes works well for me.

For example, I often practice finance and French one after another. They have absolutely nothing to do with each other, but I've noticed that both have become stronger. Sometimes walking away from one subject and asking my brain to do something completely different seems to help me when I eventually come back to the first one.

I don't know whether everyone's brain works exactly like mine.

But I now trust my brain a lot more than I used to.

When I encounter something complicated, I don't immediately think, There is too much here. I'll never remember this.

I've already watched my brain turn a ridiculous collection of instructions about feet, knees, hips, shoulders, frame, timing and music into something it can execute without consciously thinking about every individual part.

So I know what it is capable of.

Dance can stay with you for life

This is another reason I wish more people learned to dance when they were young.

Dance doesn't have an expiration date.

You can dance at 18.

You can dance at 30.

You can dance at 50.

And I fully intend to dance at 80.

Maybe I won't be doing exactly what I'm doing today. Bodies change. Goals change. The way we dance can change.

But you can dance at weddings. You can dance at parties. You can take classes. You can perform. You can compete. You can dance socially. You can dance with your partner.

You can dance in your kitchen.

It can follow you through your entire life.

Which brings me back to high school

I meet so many adults who tell me:

"I can't dance."

And that makes me a little sad.

Because often what they really mean is:

"I never learned how to dance, and now I'm embarrassed to try."

Maybe they tried it once as a kid.

Maybe somebody made fun of them.

Maybe they decided they didn't have rhythm.

Maybe they just never had the opportunity.

Childhood and adolescence are exactly when we should be trying things we're bad at.

We haven't had decades to construct elaborate stories about all the things we "can't" do yet.

That is what school is supposed to give us: exposure.

We teach kids PE without expecting them all to become professional athletes.

We teach music without expecting them all to become musicians.

We teach art without expecting them all to become artists.

So why not dance?

I'm not suggesting every high-school student spend a semester perfecting the Viennese Waltz.

Teach them some ballroom.

Some hip-hop.

Some cultural dances.

Something contemporary.

Let them try different things.

Let them look ridiculous.

Let them step on each other's feet.

Let them laugh.

Let them fail.

Because maybe the kid who gets a dance step wrong twenty times and finally gets it on the twenty-first won't remember that particular step thirty years later.

But maybe they'll remember what it felt like to fail nineteen times and discover that nothing terrible happened.

They just tried again.

And again.

Until one day, they could do something they couldn't do before.

Maybe that's the corny lesson I've taken from ten years of dancing:

Failure isn't the opposite of success. Sometimes failure is simply the first step in learning how to get there.

And if you fail again?

Well, the music is still playing.

Take the next step.

And keep dancing.

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Disclaimer: This post was edited with the assistance of 'ChatGPT'