Stop Pretending Dance Recitals Are Important Art

I went to a dance recital last weekend where a twelve-year-old performed an interpretive piece about "the journey of the soul" to a ukulele cover of a Billie Eilish song, and everyone in the audience acted like we'd just witnessed the birth of a new artistic genius. The parents were filming. The grandparents were crying. There was a standing ovation.

I'm about to say something controversial in the dance community: not all movement is art. Some of it is just movement. And that's fine! It's good! Kids should move around and perform and feel the stage lights on their faces. But we have completely lost our minds about the artistic merit of a child executing a choreographed combination they learned in six weeks.

Here's what I actually believe: we should celebrate kids doing things. We should clap. We should bring flowers. We should tell them they looked confident and brave. What we should NOT do is pretend that their recital is equivalent to, say, a professional contemporary dance company that spent months developing a piece with real stakes and vision.

The problem is that we've flattened everything into participation trophies disguised as art. Every performance is "amazing." Every child is "so talented." Every recital is a "production." We're drowning everyone in false equivalencies, and honestly, I think it's insulting to actual choreographers and dancers who spend their whole lives mastering their craft.

Dance is one of humanity's most demanding art forms. It requires an almost impossible combination of physical rigor, emotional vulnerability, and technical precision. When you watch a real dancer—someone who has trained for years—you're seeing something extraordinary. Their bodies do things that shouldn't be possible. They make you feel things you didn't expect to feel.

So here's my unpopular opinion: let's keep doing recitals. Let's encourage kids to take classes and perform. But let's also be honest about what we're watching. We're watching kids learning. We're watching them develop discipline and confidence and coordination. That's genuinely wonderful. It doesn't need to be "art" to be worth celebrating.

The real artists—the ones pushing the boundaries of what the human body can express, the ones creating work that makes us question everything—they deserve a different category. They deserve actual criticism, actual conversation, actual stakes.

Your kid looked great up there. I'm not heartless. I clapped too. But let's all agree to stop acting shocked when a professional dancer does something that requires actual skill and vision. That's when the standing ovation becomes meaningful.