Mamas, Don't Let Your Daughters Grow Up To Be Dance Team Divas

High School high-kick dancing is a TEAM SPORT?

OMG! Who Knew? And who knew that such dance competitions and tournaments are also regulated by the Minnesota State High School League?

I didn’t. Neither did most of the people in Minnesota until Faribault’s Emeralds won the State Class AAA High-Kick Dance Championship last Saturday at the Target Center in downtown Minneapolis — and then got totally ambushed by the snottiest grrrlgrudge since “Mean Girls” took over the school cafeteria!

Instead of simply congratulating the winning team as expected, these little divas showed what kind of losers they really were. As the Emeralds took the floor to accept their first-place trophy and medals, the divas slowly moved away from the state champs —as if to shun and ostracize them. Mature. Real mature. Then the divas — including the second and third place winners — wouldn’t even get in line for the awards ceremony. Talk about your stereotypical high school passive-aggressive bullying! It was alive and well, courtesy of dancers from Wayzata, Chaska, Lakeville, Apple Valley, and Eden Prairie. In fact, the second and third place awards weren’t even given out because the childish behavior of those protesting teams got them disqualified for “unsportsmanlike conduct.”

So much for Minnesota Nice…

So why the big retaliatory snub from these poor losers?

Because the winners SUPPOSEDLY didn’t follow the rules.

Because the general consensus of the bad grrrls was that Faribault’s Emeralds stole the winning dance routine from the Copper Hills Azurettes, another dance team based in Utah. In other words, Faribault’s dance routine (along with costumes, makeup, and music) weren’t original. They broke the rules, but they won, anyway. Not fair! Not fair!

But here’s where the saga becomes less like real life and more like an episode of “Glee” scripted by Joyce Carol Oates.

According to a news story featured in “The Minneapolis Star Tribune” (on Wednesday, February 18th), this accusation of creative theft was made in an anonymous letter that was sent to the MSHSL before the tournament began. Despite the secret identity of the accuser, this complaint was taken very seriously. The charges were investigated.

After Faribault activities director Ken Hubert did an investigation and after the MSHSL conducted its own review, the Emeralds were cleared of these charges and allowed to compete.

That should have been the end of this teenage intrigue. It wasn’t.

By the time the state tournament got under way, too many of the dance teams, coaches, and parents had already pre-judged the Emeralds. They had already decided that these competitors from Faribault were cheaters who didn’t deserve to be in the competition. After all, they had already seen the Azurette’s routine on YouTube and made up their minds.

Welcome to the clique-y little world of dance team competition where bias and subjectivity always take 1st place.

So competitive were these girls that reality took a back seat to winning. They ignored the governing power of the state league and the finality of its decision.

More importantly, they ignored the reality of copyrighting choreography and the ambiguity that surrounds it. In fact, no one interviewed by any reporters from TV or print media ever mentioned the word “copyright’ at all. That’s probably because no one in this terpsichorean brain trust had even considered the possibility — or difficulty — of legally protecting choreography. They should have.

After all, the major bone of contention in this dance-o-drama involves the integrity of the Emerald’s dance routine.

The school, coaches, and dancers from Faribault all claim they performed an original dance, merely inspired by the Azurette’s routine. Most of Faribault’s competitors, however, insisted the winning team’s choreography (along with other elements not officially judged like costume and makeup) was stolen/plagiarized/copied from the Azurette’s dance routine.

Certainly, if the choreography of Utah’s dance team had been properly registered with the Copyright Office, there would have been way less confusion, tears, and hurt feelings in Minnesota last week. But wait. Can dance choreography actually be copyrighted?

In a word, YES! Yes, it can, but it’s a relatively new concept. It’s only been available for the past thirty-nine years, and some complexities and gray areas still exist with copyrighting choreography.

For an informative yet surprisingly entertaining read on the subject, Google Julia Haye’s article at LawLawLandBlog.com.

“So You Think You Can Steal My Dance? Copyright Protection In Choreography” covers a lot of interesting aspects on such legal protection. Although posted over four years ago, on September 13, 2010, her discussion of the 1976 Copyright Act and what it means for dancers and choreographers still rings true today.

The question of ownership might be especially significant to the Emeralds, Azurettes, and MSHSL. That is, who really owns the choreography in question and the rights to it? According to Ms. Haye, “…generally, any work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment is owned by the employer, and choreography is no exception. Even the heirs of the great Martha Graham were surprised to learn that they did not own the rights to many of her most famous works.”

So this award-winning dance routine could be an inspired yet original work of the Emeralds. Or it could be the exclusive creative work of the Azurettes. But would the choreography be owned by the school or the coach who choreographed it? Who actually owns this creative property?

That’s definitely a problem. A much bigger problem, though, has to do with the adults — not the girls — involved with these dance teams.

When it comes to dance competition, the girls aren’t the only ones who’ve forgotten friendliness and good sportsmanship. For the grown-ups obsessed with winning, Minnesota Nice doesn’t just rhyme with ice, it also rhymes with price.

There’s a new kind of icy, pricey class warfare infiltrating the schools these days. A real socio-economic, demographic, class thing. Now that participation in school sports can run up to $10,000 per kid per year, parents with deep pockets expect a return on their investment. Think about it.

If these parents are paying up to $10,000 a year just so their kid can participate in athletic activities while other parents of another student athlete are paying nothing or next to nothing for the same privilege, there will be problems when the $10,000 kid loses a game or competition.

Now I’m not claiming that each and every girl on one of these dance teams is costing her respective Mom and Dad 10K a year. The actual, overall cost of being on a high school dance team remains unknown at this time. But I am saying that when parents invest a lot of money — not to mention time, energy, transportation, costuming, cosmetics, supplemental dance and exercise lessons, dance team camps and seminars — for their daughters, they expect them to win big. Notice that I used the verb expect, not want, wish, or hope. So when their daughters don’t win…well, they’re REALLY not happy about it.

BIG MONEY + UNHAPPY PARENTS = LAWSUITS

Get ready. The Great Minnesota Dance-O-Drama isn’t over yet.