Going To The Dance

The other day, I was at an event which included a dance.  The dance was well attended, but a friend of mine mentioned that he'd heard that the dance was once the central event, and no longer was.  He further observed that it seemed to him that dances had once been a central event for people, but that era had passed.

I've never thought of that, but I think there's something to it.  Not that dances don't occur, I just don't think that dancing is as big of a deal to people now as it once was.

In making this observation, I have to note that I can't dance. But then maybe that forms part of my observation.  I never learned how.  When I was of that age, it seemed that traditional dancing was not in vogue.  There were high school dances, but swing dancing, etc., didn't occur at them. This was also true of the very few dances I attended while in college.  The Rock and; Roll era of the 1960s had impacted dancing to the point of almost destroying it, to some degree, so that by the late 1970s and 1980s, my high school and college years, dancing was sort of a free style type of deal.  You'd see it, to be sure, at school dances or college bars, but nothing like that depicted above.

And it wasn't as if people said "let's go out dancing" either, or even "let's go to the dance".  While at the University of Wyoming I think I went to one actual "dance", a dance at a dormitory that the foreign students association hosted.  All the other dancing I saw during the 80s in Laramie was at parties, concerts or bars, and all of it was the descendant of the rock type that became predominant in the 1960s.

But this wasn't always so.  As noted above, a friend of mine noted how dancing was once a much more common event, and further commented how, in Western Nebraska, where he was from, people in small towns had frequently "gone to the dance" on weekend evenings, or at least young people do. And I've heard many recollections of that type as well.  Indeed, just last night, at a 50th wedding anniversary party I heard a recollection about the "dances in Powder River". Powder River is a small town in western Natrona County, and I bet that there hasn't been a dance held there in decades.  Apparently there used to be one darned near every weekend, and I don't doubt that something like that was close to correct.

I will note, on that, that once I started to date my wife, who in fact is from Powder River, that I encountered real dancing for the first time.  Rural people in Wyoming all know how to dance, so it's pretty evident that dancing as a social event has hung on in the rural west. And they dance well too.  Even today, at wedding receptions of rural couples, real swing dancing is very common, to all types of music.  Perhaps, of course, it's coming back in, in general, but I'd be surprised.

I'm not sure what sparked this change, but whatever it is, is part of a bigger trend.  A book sometime ago entitled "Bowling Alone" advanced the thesis that Americans more and more engage in solitary activities, rather than getting out with people.  While to anyone generation that's hard to perceive, I think it evident that this is true.  Probably our hectic lives, and television, and now the computer, all contribute to that.  At one time people had to get out, basically, or the only other option was staying at home reading or listening to the radio (after there were radios).  Therefore, group activities of any kind, were much more significant than they are now for many, indeed most, people.