Yes, I did enjoy Mad Hot Ballroom. I also enjoyed the feature film based on the experience of the gentleman who organized that dance competition. I’m a sucker for (ballroom) dance movies and romantic comedies. I’ve got slightly mixed feelings about competitive dance. I think it’s cool to have something with culture and style that’s made attractive to younger folks, but I also like the idea of dancing just being fun and free and social.

Perhaps these programs help produce more interest in ballroom dance, but I’m finding less a shortage of people who know how to dance flawlessly and more a shortage of men who know how to lead and ladies who know how to follow. Last night, my first waltz partner knew how to follow and it was really nice. My second waltz partner was the caller, and she knew how to follow, but she also threw in a back-lead from time to time. This is the first time I’ve had two partners who could follow in a very long time.

(I wonder if dancing was bigger in the 80s even among the youth than it has been in succeeding generations…)

When I was a freshman at BYU and at the peak of my dancing powers, our branch president absolutely loved me, because I didn’t have a girlfriend but I loved to dance, so I would pretty much dance with a different girl every dance, and he thought that was great. I actually got to visit him while I was on my mission in Colorado, and elder I was with talked about the dancing prowess of another missionary, an Elder Deets, known as “Disco Deets,” and my old Branch President said, “Well, if he is Disco Deets, this is Bouncing Barney.”

One time he had a group of us from his branch give a demonstration to the junior high kids on various styles of dance. That was a load of fun and the kids were actually very engaged and interested. I remember one boy in particular was a real natural. (Have you ever seen Mad Hot Ballroom? If not, I highly recommend it.)

When I first moved into this stake, they used to hold the annual G&G Ball in a local mall they would rent out for the evening. In one part of the mall they had a ballroom music band for the adults, and in another part they had a DJ for the younger folk (which is where I always went). It was totally awesome. But then a new Stake President came in, a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph, and put a kibosh on these affairs as an extravagance.

On the matter of dance partners, in the contradance community it’s normative to switch partners after every dance, and to dance with many different partners in an evening. If one comes with a date, it’s common to dance the first contradance with the date, and the the waltz at the break and the waltz at the end of the night as well, but the rest of the contradances are usually danced with different partners. But your partner is just someone you dance with a bit more than anybody else in your set, so there’s less implied romantic potential than in a couple dance.

26 — I think most of the problem is that, thirty years ago, there was no question that a dance for adults would be done ballroom style. Today, there is no one dance style that everybody knows how to do and enjoys. One of my dreams has been to have our stake sponsor community dances, where different styles of dance are taking place in different parts of the various buildings in the stake, so you can have Church-standard settings in which to do whatever kinds of dance are popular in your community (obviously including contradance, ECD and SCD afaic, but including whatever the kids are dancing to these days, and rock and country dancing over the past few decades). It would take some interfacing with the dance communities in each stake to see which styles can share space with each other, etc., and a fair amount of publicity, but this could take the place of stake youth dances and could be a major low-key missionary opportunity. Mormons are not the only people who like to dance without smoking, drinking and simulated sex going on around them, and dance groups would welcome the chance to hold dances without having to pay rent.

Or, in fewer words, we no longer have a unified cross-generational culture (if, in fact, we ever did). We also are in the days after the block program came into place, and we’re just not used to centering our lives around the church buildings the way they did 30 years ago.

The inclusion of music (the universal language of the soul) and dance (the kinesthetic expression of that language) in that celebration is a wonderful thing. I am SO glad that dancing is a big part of the temple dedication process in many places; I wish it were so everywhere and hope it will be in the future.

Russell: I assume it’s a tradition. I heard about the cultural evening at Radio City Music Hall when the Manhattan temple opened, and big stadium-filling events in Ghana and Nigeria. In Helsinki, each country in the temple district did a sequence. Like Susan M said, there is a sense that they’re dancing for the prophet. (In Helsinki, GBH said that if he were younger, he join in the dancing. I wanted to shout out, ‘Elder Scott’s not that old … he can dance!” A great visual that still makes me smile when I see him.)

Second, I think the documentary emphasized Mormon dance because of a desire by the makers to connect the religion to the evangelical movements of the early eighteen-hundreds, Burned-Over District and elsewhere. Dancing was one of many attempts to reconnect the material life with the spiritual life in an industrial and mechanical age, when that connection appeared to be failing.

So I suspect the point made by the documentary is valid, if a bit unclear – since dance does not seem as important to many modern Mormons as it did to their ancestors.