Did you have to do stuff with parachutes, too?
And Maypoles?
Yes! Wtf was that abut?
To get slightly more on track with the OP, does anyone remember “caging” a slow dancing couple? Kids would gather around them and lock arms and keep them trapped until they kissed.
Caveat that I can’t speculate what teens are into, nor can I honestly say I spend much time at the ballroom, but last time they had stuff like the waltz (= slow), the tango, the foxtrot, the quickstep, Latin styles, etc. None of those are new, so there you go as far as enduring popularity spanning generations.
The kind of “slow dancing” I think we’re talking about here isn’t really even a dance step; it’s just a couple with their bodies pressed as closely together as the chaperone will allow, arms around each other’s waists or shoulders, and slowly swaying (not necessarily in time with the music).
That is practically a folk dance. But maybe some teens are into old-school social dances…
Understood. But then my vote is it’s not a dance, as you say. Still could be popular, of course.
Maybe not, though calling it “dancing” gave it a veneer of it not being “furtive clothed sexual activity.”
I took three years of formal dance and I am positive I have never formally danced outside of those classes. It is always bodies close and a slow sway kind-of in rhythm with the music. Which was still fun. It’s nice having the girl in your arms (I’m a guy…can’t speak for how the women felt about it but they seemed to enjoy it too).
It’s actually kinda hard to do an actual dance-step on a crowded dance floor where no one else is doing that.
I took a ballroom dance clase at a local adult education place. Despite a congenital deformity called Midwest White-Guy Hips, I rather enjoyed it. Was better at waltz and tango than any of the Latin steps.
I never danced after the class, but might if I had someone to go with.
I remember both of those. Did anyone else have to listen to Robert Preston singing about chicken fat?
That’s Nights in White Satin. But for many years I too thought it was Knights.
I remember the square dancing (Now, promenade!), and the parachute (best use of Hot Butter’s “Popcorn”, maybe my favorite activity from PE besides crab soccer). Apparently Robert Preston’s recording had gone out of fashion by then, but I do know that song from somewhere.
As far as slow dancing goes, I didn’t understand the point of it until my senior prom. The idea of it allowing you to slowly grind your hips against a willing participant in public simply hadn’t occurred to me. I wasn’t even aware that kids today had school dances.
I hadn’t thought about it for years, but it got mentioned once on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. It was one of those three-things-that-sound-impossibly-ridiculous-but-one-of-them-is-true questions. I remember the song from elementary school so I got the question immediately, but no one else seemed to be familiar with it.
Doing a search just now, it appears we talked about it ten years ago when the song was used in an Apple commercial. The best part is, they had to use a cover version.
Your version of slow dancing is very different from my experience.
For me, there was absolutely no pelvic grinding or touching. I stood about six inches from my partner with my right-hand around her waist and resting on the small of her back and my left hand out-stretched holding her right hand with her left hand on my shoulder.
Never, ever, ever did we grind or even touch our pelvises together (or anything really).
That’s interesting—I have never heard of the connection between Henry Ford’s antisemitism and square dancing. Ironically enough, my high school still included a nontrivial square dancing unit in the PE program back in the ‘80s despite the fact that the school was approximately 50% Jewish by demographic.
My own experience was that slow dancing at school dances was ubiquitous starting in 6th grade. It was also the highlight of the night for me—once I got up the nerve to ask someone to dance.
Anybody who went to high school in the mid-late 1970s knows “Colour [sic] My World” by Chicago. It was the slow dance song back then.
The guy would start by holding the girl by her hips. The girl would put her hands on the guy’s shoulders. By the end of the song, he would be holding the small of her back, maybe higher with one hand, and she would be holding his back. That was slow dancing.
As an aside, “Colour My World” has a very pretty flute solo, and as a flautist, I’m pleased to say that I’ve played it live.
This was my experience as well.
Well, I’d chalk it up to my experience probably being later than yours (both in relative age and absolute-ish time). By the time I was in high school, the slow dance was a time to hold your partner really close and rhythmically shuffle around, maybe even kiss. I distinctly remember my date to prom looking up and saying “Hello there” in the middle of the slow dance and my slow ass brain eventually realizing that she expected me to kiss her. I knew she had a steady boyfriend who went to another school, and she was really out of my league. So I didn’t take her up on the perceived offer. It’s almost certainly my loss.
Either way, my prom was a kindergarten show vs. what my wife did in lieu of her senior prom. She hung out with a bunch of guys who were on acid, including myself. By the tail end of Gen X, slow dancing wasn’t even on the radar, they were on to more adventurous stuff. Six inch separation wasn’t happening unless you were going to a religious school.
FWIW…what I was relating were formal dance lessons. It was at the local school but still, a formal environment. We were in a class. It was not just a dance floor, do as you please thing. It was also 1979/80/81 so maybe a different time.
We certainly got up to no good, but not there.
In my mid-40s. Never been to a school dance (or danced at all), remember exactly one time having a random square dance thing (and the electric slide once for some reason), and think we used the parachutes weekly for all of elementary PE.