A pursuit once condemned as bourgeois during the Cultural Revolution is to go mainstream in China: the waltz is set to become compulsory in every secondary school.

Children will be required to take dance classes as part of a campaign to help students to get fit and acquire more social graces.

The Ministry of Education has designed seven sets of dance steps that are intended to suit the physical and psychological characteristics of students of different ages. Each dance will last about five minutes and will be performed during breaks between classes or in extracurricular periods. The ministry said that dance lessons would not replace physical exercise classes.

Authorities hope that the combination of dance and sport in schools will help to tackle the rise in youth obesity in China. The country’s strict “one couple, one child” family planning policy has spawned a generation that is pampered by adoring parents and grandparents who ply youngsters with extra food and treats. Children are also gaining weight because their heavy homework loads and after-school activities, such as piano tuition or extra classes in such subjects as English or mathematics laid on by ambitious parents, are reducing their opportunities to play.

Nearly one in five people in China is overweight or obese and the problem is growing worse among children, especially boys.

The Education Ministry will distribute a video for the first dance sets throughout the provinces, and teachers will be required to learn the steps in order to teach them to pupils from September. New sets will be produced every two years.

It is a far cry from the days of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution when ballet dancers were sent to work in the fields and all dancing was banned as a decadent bourgeois evil. For a decade the only dance permitted was the “loyalty dance”, a demonstration of adoration for Mao Zedong that involved little more than swinging the arms from the heart and into the air in the direction of Mao.

These days officials have other goals in mind. Wang Wenrong, of the Guangxi Normal College in southern China, said: “Group dancing will help cultivate students’ social graces and sense of collectivism.”

However, Hong Chengwen, an education expert at Beijing Normal University, said that it was important to ensure the children would enjoy the dances. He cautioned that it could be particularly difficult to encourage dancing among middle school students in their early teens who may be shy of interacting with the opposite sex.

China is anxious to promote more physical activity among students. Last month the ministry proposed that students would need not only good grades, but also proof of their physical fitness to gain a place at university.

The ministry is considering recording the results of physical tests in students’ academic files, and could use them as a way to split university applicants who have the same score on written tests. Competition for places at China’s top universities is gruelling.

Stepping out

— Dating from the mid-18th century, the Waltz is the oldest of the formal ballroom dances

— It is thought to be based on the German ‘Lander’ folk dance

— Originally called the ‘Walzer’, the name derives from volvere, the Latin for ‘to turn’ or ‘to spin’

— It was spread through Europe by Napoleon's soldiers who encountered it while occupying Germany

— It provoked outrage in European ballrooms because of the scandalous physical proximity it required.

— From 1830 the Waltz received a massive boost in popularity due to compositions by Lanner and Strauss.

Source: dancelovers.com

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