Adventures in YSA Dance Planning

Back around the turn of the millennium in the backwoods of Washington state, my teenage self was selected to some "Stake Youth Leadership Committee" or whatever it was called; ostensibly its purpose was to call one representative teen from each ward, in order to involve the Youth of Zion directly in the decision-making processes of the Stake by...doing leadership things, I guess?  Actually, I never was quite clear what our point was.

Mainly we went to meetings.  Lots and lots of meetings.  I seem to recall a group of us painfully self-conscious, sleep-deprived teenagers already anxious about school, sports, extracurriculars, summer jobs, college-admissions, and trying not to have lustful thoughts about the opposite sex (or the same-sex, whatever the case may have been), gathered around a large mahogany table at the Stake Center on a rainy Saturday afternoon with some Baby Boomers who knew our parents.

They solicited our feedback on various particulars pertinent to the youth of the Church, earnestly listened to our suggestions, seriously discussed them...then promptly dismissed off hand, as the adults in the room kindly informed us what we were going to do instead.  It didn't take me long to realize that our actual function was less to be "leaders" (as we were repeatedly--and perhaps a bit too earnestly--assured), than to serve as the glorified errand-boys (and girls) of the Stake Presidency.

Primarily this service involved unfolding chairs.  That, and reluctantly inviting surly teenagers to attend some Sunday Evening Youth Fireside they didn't want to attend, particularly the night before they were expected to get up for 6:30AM Seminary (which they also didn't want to attend).  Then later, we would have to explain, yet again, to the baffled adults why no teenagers wanted to attend their lame Firesides.  They would then earnestly solicit our feedback on ways to make the Firesides more attractive to the Youth of Zion, and the cycle would begin anew.

Yet though the position was custom-made for the sneers of moody teenagers...

...I wasn't a total cynic about it, and actually tried to effect some genuine change during my tenure on that committee.  Specifically, I lasered my sights down onto the one activity under our purview that at least some of the Youth attended voluntarily:

The Church Dances.

As with all things Church related, attendance was OK but not great.  Our Church Leaders worried: How could we convince more of our Youth that dressing up in Sunday clothes on a not-Sunday in order to "boogy" to YMCA, Will Smith, and late-90s Boy Bands was more attractive than a High School party with beer, "Rap," swear words, and making out?  We were beginning with an obvious handicap, but I believed we could do it.

First, I helpfully suggested that dropping the Sunday-dress-requirement alone would vastly increase attendance.  But judging by their reactions, you'd think I'd suggested hosting heroin-fueled orgies in the chapel or serving Diet Coke: "We will not be dropping our standards," they piously affirmed.  "Who said anything about dropping standards?" I protested, "I just said we should maybe not require Church clothes at a dance!  What on earth does clothing have to do with morality?" 

"We don't want immodest clothing in our dances," they parried.  "Since when are jeans and t-shirts immodest?" I asked, "What is so unspiritual about dancing in comfortable clothing?"  Nevertheless, they somehow had it in their mind that neck-ties and floor-skirts were all that stood between us and "spaghetti-straps" and/or leather-bondage, I guess.  (It was precisely this sort of False-Binary thinking that drove me to Post-Structuralism in the first place).

"We're not dropping our clothing standards," they made clear in no uncertain terms.  "Alright, but don't keep complaining to me when no one attends your dances," I replied.  (As you can probably guess, I only lasted a year in that calling).

Nevertheless, I could see that the non-Sunday-clothes thing was a non-starter, so I shifted my attention to at least influencing the music itself.  Once again, I ran into resistance, as the adults seemed to assume that NSYNC, Smashmouth, and utterly non-self-aware renditions of the Village People was all that stood between us and grinding to Marilyn Manson or whatever.  (If I could have at least eliminated the "Men In Black" theme-song from rotation, I might have been satisfied.)  Now, granted these were popular songs at the time, and many teenagers sincerely enjoyed dancing to them, I fully understood why the DJs played them.  

But not all teenagers enjoy listening to them; shoot, even the kids who liked NSYNC didn't like listening to them all the time.  Yet adding different songs to the playlist was like pulling teeth.  Here these adults were trying to convince more Youth of Zion to attend these dances, all while actively discouraging anyone whose music tastes were even slightly left of the dial from attending.  But though we tried to introduce, say, a little Weezer now and then, or even something danceable like The Beastie Boys, the chaperones shut us down.

Once, some friends of mine got the DJ to play the goofy "Intergalactic," of all things, and the aging chaperone straight up yelled at us to shut it off.  They asked me the next day, in all bafflement, if it had "bad lyrics" or something.  We Alta Vista'd it (it was the 90s); there weren't.  Even "Hotel California," a hit from their generation, got nixed, for being about haunted houses or played-backwards-directions-to-the-L.A.-Church-of-Satan or some such nonsense.

So I narrowed down my focus even further: Chairs.  I just wanted there to be more chairs at the dances.  The folks who did bother to attend mainly just wanted hang out with their friends anyways, and it gets tiring just standing around waiting for free chairs to open.  So I suggested that we should set out more tables and chairs, to give people a place to sit and chat, you know, actually enjoy each others' company.  "But then the kids won't dance!" came the complaint. 

This was too much.  "We don't dance anyways!" I cried out, exasperated, "The music is lame, our clothes are uncomfortable, we only go cause our parents make us, and if we enjoy ourselves it's purely by accident!  If you actually want more kids to attend your boring dances, the very least you can do is put out more chairs."  They didn't concede my point, but they also didn't try to stop me when I physically opened the supply-closet myself and set out more chairs and tables all alone.  That, sadly, was the extant of my moral victories in High School.

Over a decade later, I strolled past a chapel in Utah where I could over-hear a Stake Youth Dance inside, and was astounded to pick out, yes, Will Smith and late-90s Boy Bands.  Goodness, have Church dances really changed so little since I was young?  And the folks my age who are presumably running these wards now: are they still just as baffled as their parents were by how few Youth attend their lame events?

This even feels like an easy problem to fix--especially today in the Spotify/Pandora generation, when we could easily make a whole Mutual activity out of asking kids to come up with new playlists that one could vet before a dance even began, which could in turn excite kids enough to attend these dances in the first place to hear their favorite songs.  It's a horizontal/participatory, rather than a vertical/spectacle, approach to making dances truly communal, engaging, and rejuvenating.  Once upon a time, Brigham Young held dances in the Nauvoo Temple itself--he understood the dire need of cutting loose, getting outside of yourself, and being wild and free.  Let us learn from that example and actually enjoy ourselves on purpose for a change.