Opinion: Turn Around Turnabout Dance Culture

If you’re like me, someone who loves to occasionally get dressed up for a fancy function, you’re not in luck, as there aren’t many opportunities to do so at Niles West. If you’re an underclassman, the only chance you have to let loose is at the homecoming dance, and if you’re an upperclassman, you have an additional opportunity to bring all your killer dance moves to prom. But besides those two annual events, West doesn’t host any other dances.

Traditionally, turnabout dances, also commonly referred to as the Sadie Hawkins dance, reverse the stereotypical gender roles. A female would ask out a male to be her date for the dance. Now with it being 2023, I understand how this type of school dance might not be inclusive for everyone. But as we are adapting to the times, so could turnabout dances. I don’t think that turnabouts have to be so constricting, and set in their ways where only a person identifying as a female can ask out a person identifying as a male. Though the original idea for turnabouts stemmed from heteronormative ideas, that doesn’t necessarily mean that non-binary people would be excluded. I think that the intention of a turnabout dance lies more in the fact that this is a dance, where the act of being asked to do the dance is untraditional. Turnabouts give people an additional opportunity to be with friends and loved ones, and I think that that’s the true beauty of having a turnabout.

I feel that the culture centered around high schoolers asking each other out to school dances has declined. My inner hopeless romantic is saddened by this reality, but it feels as if teenagers nowadays have lost interest in romance, and that older fashion sort of love. I always dreamed of having my rom-com moment, where I’d be asked to dance with a cheesy posterboard sign and maybe even a flash mob, or in this case, I’d be the one asking with a cheesy posterboard sign.

Turnabout dances might be something that West should try. Who knows, maybe it’ll help to live in our school spirit or bring back some cheesy romance. At the very least it would give us an excuse to maybe for once, actually talk to our hallway crush.

Having friends from other high schools that host turnabout dances for their students, I partially get a little FOMO (fear of missing out). But as a senior, I have adopted a YOLO (you only live once) mentality, where I’m less afraid of rejection now, and am more willing to put myself out there. I think that turnabout dances adopt this same mindset. It’s about putting yourself out there to ask someone to dance. Even if you were to get rejected it’s not the end of the world (even though it might feel that way), you could still go to have a good time.