Think freak dancing is a problem? Take a number. The waltz was

Oakland Tribune, Jan 26, 2006 by Candace Murphy, STAFF WRITER

THE STORY is familiar.

The kids, they just want to dance. The parents, they don't want them to dance, at least not like that. So the parents raise a stink. And the dance is banned. But the kids are mad. It's the way we express ourselves, they say. Everybody's doing it, they say.

Parents yell. Kids slam doors. Administrators wring their hands. The town is divided. All because of a dance.

The story line could be from "Footloose." Or "Dirty Dancing." Heck, it could be from any number of situations in history where dancing teens and the public have butted heads. But it's not. No, today's story of history repeating itself happened right in the Bay Area, at Pleasanton's Foothill High, which banned freak dancing, or freaking, last week.

"There's nothing wrong with the dance, it's the way it's being done," says Dorene Paradiso-Carroll of Pleasanton, whose granddaughter attends Foothill. "Elvis Presley, in my day, everybody thought was terrible. But compared to what they're doing today, it doesn't even compare."

In truth, the big hubbub over freak dancing is nothing new. Freak dancing cast fear in the hearts of parents nationwide more than five years ago when stories about the dance -- whose most complicated footwork involves a young woman bending over at the waist while a young man grinds his pelvic area into her bottom -- went mainstream.

Bill "No Spin Zone" O'Reilly wrote a column comparing freak dancing to strip club lap dancing, claiming that school proms had turned into "Playboy After Dark."

Even National Public Radio checked in on the action and aired a thoughtful, measured discussion of the dance-floor craze, debating whether it was teenage self-expression or something more explicit.

At the time, many schools banned the style of dance from school functions.

But if history is any guide, the parents' reaction to freak dancing may do more harm than good.

"Freak dancing is really old news. Any town that makes a deal out of it gives it life," says Richard Powers, social dance instructor and dance historian for the Stanford dance division. "With freak dancing, there's a sense of ownership with the young people. The parental disapproval is exactly what's giving them ownership. If there wasn't any fuss, it'd be so 10 years ago to those kids. Because it is so 10 years ago."

The students, too, think the parents are overreacting.

"The students aren't as bad as the parents think, and the parents aren't as bad as the students think," says Elizabeth Usedome, a senior and associated student body president at Foothill. "It's something fun to do. I see the sexual references, but we feel like some parents are attacking us. We feel like the bad people in this."

Foothill senior Leah Kendall pointed to the salsa and tango as equally "sexually driven" dances.

"You have to give us a little bit of leeway," says Kendall. "We are good kids."

The obscene waltz

Actually, the fuss over dance styles extends much further back in history than just a decade. By all accounts, one of the first times a style of dancing caused right-thinking adults to throw their hands up in despair was in the 1830s, when the waltz roared into town.

Yes. The waltz. The simple one-two-three step danced today at weddings to the tune of "Moon River." The rolling, gliding dance that conjures up images of state rooms and ambassadors, princesses and tiaras.

It was a scandal.

So much so that the London Times penned an editorial in 1816 -- like most dances, the waltz debuted in Europe before it headed to these shores -- describing the dance as a "voluptuous intertwining of the limbs" and an "obscene display ... confined to prostitutes and adulteresses."

The dance was thought to be indecent because it was really the first time a man and woman danced as a twosome, rather than in groups. Also scandalous was the fact that the man actually placed his arm on the woman's waist.

"The waltz was banned in some areas, or at least shunned, because of the embrace," says Powers. "This was something new."

Can't stomp out a good dance

The list of new dances that have made jaws drop over the years seems endless. The turkey trot. The grizzly bear. The fox-trot. The shimmy. The shiver. The twist.

But true landmark controversial dances are different. They inspired heated passion, not only by those doing the steps, but also by those trying to stomp it out.

Most notable following the waltz was the tango, a smoldering Argentine dance that had dancers press themselves so closely together that there was "no daylight" between them. When it arrived in America a few years after sweeping Paris in 1910, evangelists preached sermons declaring that after drink, dance was the second biggest cause of immorality.

More notorious than the tango, though, was ragtime. What's really eerie is how the ragtime era of 20th century seems to be a direct foreshadowing of Pleasanton's own freaking teenagers. Take out the time period references, and it sounds like today: The older generation vocally disapproves of many aspects of youth culture, of their attire, of the fact that women are throwing away their corsets and cutting their hair, that the automobile is so important and that slang, a new way of speaking, is unintelligible.