Krönika: Dancing to Dirty Diana...

Dancing to Dirty Diana and desperately hoping other teens don’t despise me 

If you ask me what I’ve been up to, say the past, I don’t know, 85 mondays? I’ve been dancing. I’ve been showing up to the studio with dance heels leading my stride, and shaking my ass and other various curves to Madonna, Britney Spears, Ginuwine, and most recently, Michael Jackson.

If you’re looking for me, you’ll find me in the first row, smiling and stirring up cheers from all my imaginary flirts in the mirror. In burlesque, we have a foolproof strategy if you ever forget the choreography: smile and pout. A great philosophy, and quite frankly, maybe if some of our politicians adopted this too, perhaps we’d all be happier —and sexier.

If you’d perceive me, on one of those mondays, in that red studio lighting, in those heels that seem to inch taller each term, you’d probably think I'm embracing a Christina Aguilera confidence, and succeeding. You know, when she so controversially sang about getting dirrty, nasty, naughty, with sweat drippin’ all over her body? Yeah, that’s me.

But, if you’d hear my worries walking through life, you’d learn how much I anguish, distress, and panic over all the ways every teen I can even fantasise about crossing paths with, think me absolutely horrid, vile, and repugnant; and you’d never ever believe my pouting, smiling and shaking in that dance studio.

I think we, as a collective, have done something wrong if you can relate to that feeling. Ten million eyes lasering me in two, despite scarcely two actually surveying my existence. What’s up with that feeling? Walking down a street convinced I am public enemy #1, invisible signs of my face plastered on placards and pavements. A worry built by whispered rumours, unwanted, and worn-out messages uploaded to anonymous gossip accounts. We’ve created a culture built on the universally-applicable concept “us versus the other”; and when you’re the “other” just enough times, the message is memorialised in the very muscles and mentality that carries you through each minute.

Sitting in the car with that very Christina Aguilera song quietly playing in my right ear, my aunt comments on the very culture I’ve been questioning: where’s our sense of community? A cup of sugar, a kind comment when commuting, a door held a second longer; fleeting gestures that may uplift the day of that stranger stringing along solemn woes of their own. Instead, these have been swapped out with skeptical glances, lackluster “hello”s, and growing self-checkout lines; oh the woes of one’s ipseity!

A freshly released generation spreading an enveloping rhetoric of passivity, and an elder generation complaining until their hearts turn sour and their lips crack and blister; a touch of softness is in order. Coat your words in silken cordiality, warm your hands over the fire of generosity, before it smolders. Shatter the sharpened trend of communityless individuality and pay someone a compliment! A boy complimented my sunflowers on the bus, and he was repaid with one of his own; he gained a flower, I gained a grin, and we both grew into sunflower friends. So, instead of that heedless mask of bore, try out some burlesqueisms: smile, and pout!

“Click. Clack. Click. Clack.” So go my steps into that crimsoned and mirrored dance studio. Each step symphonied with a greeting and a smile, because in that glass bubble of a studio, not one syllable of vitriol can be caught, not even by the tip of my heel, nor the skin of my flashed teeth. The world outside may be cold, rainy, caustic, and rude; but this room has no windows nor frigid breezes, only the hearts of dancing souls and their rich reflections, warming the world with velveted kindness.

Detta är en krönika. Ställningstaganden och analyser är skribentens egna. Kultur Ungdom är en ideell förening som är partipolitiskt och religiöst obunden. Verksamheten utgår från de unga medlemmarnas initiativ.