A furor is raging in dance studios – and online -- about when it's appropriate for young dancers to perform sexually-charged dance routines.
Toronto mom Lisa Sandlos, a dance instructor herself, says she's been in dance her whole life but has recently noticed a shift in the choreography at dance competitions, with young girls now regularly doing some fairly shocking moves in their routines.
While preschool dancers still favour tutus and pirouettes, it's not uncommon to now see serious hip shaking, strutting, and pelvis thrusting in dancers who are in Grade 1.
"It is amazing how it's in most dance competitions. It's in the majority of dance recitals. There's an element of over-sexuality in dance groups of young girls, as young as six and seven," Sandlos told CTV's Canada AM Wednesday.
Sandlos points to what has become an infamous performance making the rounds on YouTube. The video shows 8- and 9-year-olds clad in crop tops, lacy hot pants and knee-high boots shaking to Beyoncé's "Single Ladies." The video was shot at the World of Dance competition in California last spring.
Sandlos is now writing her dance PhD thesis at York University, and is hoping to better explore the role of mothers in the dance world.
She's interviewed the girls involved in what she feels is sexually charged dancing at dance competitions, and says the girls themselves don't seem to know what the fuss is about.
"I do not believe they understand the implications of what they're doing," Sandlos says. "They're just doing what they're taught. They're mimicking what they see in media or from their instructors."
She notes that the girls receive a lot of "positive reinforcement" from dancing this way, with cheers from the crowd and trophies from the judges at competitions.
Three years ago, Sandlos had her daughter in a dance studio where she noticed girls around the age of seven "using a movement vocabulary that I wasn't comfortable with" and one that she thought "compromised the art form."
So she pulled her out of that school and now has her in one that isn't focused on competition. Sandlos says she's not against dance competition per se or the studios interested in competing.
"I don't think they're setting out to exploit children," she says. "I just think awareness needs to be generated among the dance community about where we're going with this."
