The Politics of Dancing in the Year 3050
Great Moves!
By Joy Held
It is the year 3050 and you are running for dance teacher. The campaign is progressing pretty well and you are ahead in the polls. The local wireless newspaper did a survey of 1000 random online readers and your name topped the list of voters who feel that your qualifications, experience, and projections for the world of dance align with their own. It’s been a dancing universe literally for over one hundred years and people take the election of dance teacher very seriously. How did you get to be the frontrunner?
In the world of politics, then and now, it’s about image. Expertise and past successes play a part, but when the voters look at the candidates running for dance teacher they make their decisions on what you look like as well as what you promise. After all, dancing is supposed to produce visible results.
It has taken 250 years, but the universal authorities recognize the all-around benefits of dancing and it is prescribed for almost all physical and mental rehabilitations. Even the space sailors who manage the orbiting military training centers perform daily dance stretches and routines designed to accelerate mental and physical acuity through movement-brain stimulation. Dance teachers are elected to the official position in every community on the globe, under water, and of course, in the space villages. It’s here in these age defying centers that people advanced in years well beyond age 90 practice some form of dance for health and continued longevity. To be elected dance teacher is to be a trusted member of the ruling organization that oversees the balanced growth, health, and total development of the individual. Without dance training, members of society would fall into ruin physically, mentally, emotionally, and culturally.
The job of dance teacher entails a wide range of responsibilities and only a candidate with the training and knowledge of dance, wireless colleges, and health care are suited for the role. It has taken you years of study and internship under other elected dance teachers to be in the place you are today. If you win this election, you will direct the dance experiences of a large staff of dance instructors in health, education, and social settings all over the region. The position of dance teacher means you have to design the movement requirements, training schedules, competition programs, and social offerings of hundreds of dancers. Your staff must be top notch. Like you at one time, they are training for the possibility of running for the office of dance teacher and overseeing the wellbeing of many people.
It’s not an easy job. The competitions make or break you. Your teachers have to be current on the latest rules, categories, and techniques required at every stage of the young dancer’s development. If your young dancers loose too many races, your validity as an elected dance teacher will come under fire and the next election won’t be so easy. You won’t have a proven track record to display to the masses and it will be harder to convince voters that you know what you’re doing. But the competitions are hard on the young dancers. They frequently come out of this stage of preparation with battered bodies and wounded egos. Some young dancers in your region have committed irrational acts on themselves and their dance shoes after losing in just one contest. Some losers have never been heard from again and these black marks make your job as dance teacher tricky. How do you keep the young competitors healthy and stable while growing the numbers you need to stay in office?
Part of why you decided to run for office is your own experience with the competition phase of the dance training required for young people. A good body for the physical requirements, dancers as ancestors, and a good bit of survival instincts helped get you through the competition period without too much damage. When you lost, you learned to repeat the positive self-talk you heard in your home from your family leaders. If it weren’t for that early exposure to, “I didn’t lose, I gave it my all,” over and over from your family unit, you might have fallen victim to the emotional defeat packaged with the loss at the competition and not been able to progress. Instead, once you were separated from the family unit and placed with other young dancers in the learning portals, you kept repeating the good words you heard as a young child no matter what happened. But you do carry the scars and that’s why your platform includes some changes to the competition factor of dance training for the younger population.
Dance is so integral to the health and stability of the general population that you’re taking a risk by suggesting some changes. People believe in dance as a medicinal and cultural tool but the numbers of damaged dancers due to competitions cannot be shoved under the exercise mat any longer. You’ve suggested a few adjustments that compensate for the dancers heredity and physical components. You’ve added categories to the competitions and cut back on the number of required assessments. You’ve made the safeguarding of young dancers an important part of your platform and it’s obvious voters have long felt the same way you do and they want the minds and bodies of young dancers in training protected while being challenged. That means strict observance of the categories, better access to medical care at the contests, and longer breaks between the competitions to give dancers time to heal and improve.
The election is next Tuesday and your team is feeling confident that you will come out a winner, but will the young dancers? Will you get the chance to reset the parameters of the races and still prove to everyone that dancers develop fine without rigid grading and comparisons? Good luck.
Joy Held is a dance and yoga instructor and the author of Writer Wellness, A Writer’s Path to Health and Creativity, New Leaf Books, 2003. Contact her at yogajoy@suddenlink.net.