Maggie

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/13/you_are_stealing_our_future_greta

My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 15 years old, and I’m from Sweden. I speak on behalf of Climate Justice Now!

Many people say that Sweden is just a small country, and it doesn’t matter what we do. But I’ve learned that you are never too small to make a difference. And if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school, then imagine what we could all do together if we really wanted to.

But to do that, we have to speak clearly, no matter how uncomfortable that may be. You only speak of green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake. You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children.

But I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet. Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money. Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. It is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few.

The year 2078, I will celebrate my 75th birthday. If I have children, maybe they will spend that day with me. Maybe they will ask me about you. Maybe they will ask why you didn’t do anything while there still was time to act. You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.

Until you start focusing on what needs to be done, rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope. We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis. We need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground, and we need to focus on equity. And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, then maybe we should change the system itself.

Many mornings they would gather in the doorway of my classroom and watch us struggle through our bar warmups or jumble up a new technique while they smiled and whispered to each other.

And every morning I dreaded seeing them there because I knew they were making fun of me.

I had other classes with some of them, and I was always embarrassed when ballet came up, and it always did, them being ballet majors, because I loved to talk about it but knew they’d seen me dance, and I was sure they thought I didn’t belong in the conversation.

At the end of the semester, our instructor announced that she’d like to invite the dancers from the next door studio to sit in on our final performance as an audience, and everyone in my class hesitated. We’d worked so hard, we wanted to celebrate our progress during our final without being judged. Most of us left class that day suddenly more anxious about the final than we’d ever been.

The next morning, in one of my other classes I had with the ballet majors, one of them approached me, and as if she’d been reading our minds the entire semester, she said

“Hey. I just wanted to say that I know we watch you guys dance a lot, and I wanted to make sure you know we’re never laughing at you. When we watch you guys learn the basics…..it reminds us of when we first started when we were younger. It’s like…looking at ourselves when we first fell in love with dancing. That’s why we love watching you guys.”

It shocked me. I felt awash with relief and utterly stupid all at once.

Here I had spent an entire semester assuming the worst of people who had otherwise been nothing but nice to me in every other setting, and I had no one to blame for that but my own insecurities that I’d allowed to rule me for months.

I’d been so unfair to these girls, because I was self conscious. I was so worried about being judged that I’d judged all of them.

Here I was worried they were laughing at me, and all along they were looking at me with nothing but absolute delight, even envy for what I was getting to experience.

This encounter changed my entire attitude, permanently.

It made me realize that, yeah sometimes people are jerks for no reason, but more often than not, people really are just….Good.

Since that day, I’ve started giving everyone the benefit of the doubt until they prove me wrong, for their sake and for my own.

And I’ve learned that the world becomes a lot better and life becomes a lot easier when you accept that maybe not everyone is judging you. Maybe you’re the one who’s hardest on yourself.

Let yourself be. Let yourself exist and breathe and be happy.

Check out this diagram from ResearchGate.  It deals with the color vision of horses, who are also generally dichromatic.  (I think, though I’m not sure, that zebras would have the same color vision as horses.)  See how orange and green look to them?

or how about a leopard?

It’s called ‘disruptive colouration’ because the markings help to break up the animal’s outline against the grasses or rocks. And the rosettes on leopards and jaguars? Sun spots shining through the trees and leaves on the ground.

French Person: Non c’est une fucking pomme 

The difference a year makes! One year ago I posted the pic on the left with the caption, “Sorry about all the Irish dance music coming from my room, I’m working through some stuff.” For the next month and a half I ran through all the drills I could remember. In late June / early July I took my first class as an adult. Now, after a year, I took the picture on the right.

As someone with chronic pain and a ton of body image issues (mostly gender related), exercise can be a minefield both physically and emotionally. While dance has helped me to get fitter and stronger and provided the motivation I needed to start eating more healthily, that doesn’t mean it’s been entirely plain sailing. I’ve had some Bad Thoughts™ about my body during the process, and have fought hard to avoid obsessing about it.

So, this is not a “fitspo” post. Until I took these photos I didn’t realise how different I looked from a year ago and how much more toned my entire body is (especially my legs). I didn’t take up Irish dance again with the intention of losing weight or whatever – and I actually weigh the same as I did two years ago. The difference is that now I have muscle. I think fixating on the number on the scales is just a one way ticket to disordered thinking. I know, because I’ve come very close to that point myself.

alright, i’m not pretending to be an expert on it. but i did irish dancing for 7+ years and gave it up about a year and a half ago, so i do know a bit.

basically, it’s being americanised, along with a lot of other parts of our culture. i love that irish dancing is still part of our community, and that people still do it. but it’s becoming a beauty pageant.

presentation is an important part of dance, and i recognise that. dresses are cool, makeup is cool, fake tan is cool, wigs are cool. wear what you want, present yourself how you like.

it’s just that (when competing) the more diamantés you have on your dress/tiara, the higher your score is automatically raised. my old class dress (no diamantés) cost around €500. a solo dress costs much more, the price depending on the amount of diamantés on it. it costs so, so much to “look the part”.

how you dance still matters, but not as much as it should. i don’t mean to sound like one of those “oh it was better in the old days” people, but it was less based around looks. and i do think it was more irish, less altered.

i do love irish dancing, i just don’t like the way it’s run.

And, like @peacegracehero mentioned already, a lot of major dress companies are based out of Ireland or the UK. I don’t know whether it’s them making crazy dress designs to appeal to Americans or if they want this just as much as most Americans do. But when it comes down to it, they are the ones manufacturing the dresses, and we(Americans) are the ones buying them, so once again, both sides can really be considered at fault for this one. 

I wish both sides could take a step back and go “hmm maybe we don’t need to spend 3,500+ euros on a dress to get a better score” (or alternatively, for moments when you still might have faith in the judging of Irish dance competitions, “hmmm maybe a 3,500+ euro dress doesn’t change my score in the first place”) but Irish dance is sort of like a cult at times and mob mentality is real. It’s hard being the one person who doesn’t go in for every fashion investment, eventually people cave and just wear what the majority wears :/

again, sorry about that whole “americanised” part. i completely agree with you on your point of it being a joint effort. people love to stand out when dancing, no matter where they’re from.

as a result of this it would make sense for designers to create more extravagant dresses, because the amount of people willing to buy them is the majority of the irish dancing community. and as both you and @peacegracehero have said, the majority of those designers are from ireland and the uk. the point i made about it being “americanised” wasn’t a very good one, sorry again!

I have to say that I’m not keen on these new dresses with the super tight/mesh/cutout sleeves. I’ve even seen several dresses that have cutouts bear the collar and/or flesh colored mesh over cutouts in the bodice (Erin Mcpolin’s new dress is a good example*). To me, it seems like we’re straying dangerously close to ice skater territory. There’s nothing derogatory to ice skaters meant by this; God knows they work just as hard as we do at making their sport look effortless. But. Let ice skaters look like ice skaters and let Irish dancers look like Irish dancers. These new style sleeves and cutouts were probably started by dressmakers trying to make the dresses more athlete friendly- lighter weight, more ventilation, and people ran with it because it was a sleeker, sexier look. This globalization (to use the term from above) has gone a little too far this time. I’ll accept the dresses dripping in rhinestones even though dresses that have only rhinestones as the design and no applique or knotwork are not my favorite either, but I don’t like seeing our sport turning into something it’s not. Maybe I’m a little old fashioned, since I started dancing towards the end of the Riverdance boom and my first solo dress was a heavy giant three panel, but Irish dance is not supposed to be a sexy or alluring style of dance. It’s supposed to be about rhythm, power, and grace. We are athletes. We are here to compete. Looking sexy should not be a part of that.

(Although I will say that a man who can dance a hornpipe set at speed 70 with perfect rhythm…damn. 😉)

I think it isn’t just the dresses that have changed, but the style of dance itself. One of my TCs was talking in class a few months ago about how it’s all about the tricks now- who can come up with the best, most amazing tricks in their steps, and execute them best (he was talking about how someone broke their ankle almost a decade ago adding something into her step (on stage at a major) that should be physically impossible, and how he now sees many people doing the same movement without doing so). It makes sense, since dancers have also become better and closer to “the perfect irish dancer”, and need something more to catch the judges’ eyes, but I think this is also really important to think about. He was talking about the tricks in terms of pushing bodies past what they should do, without intensive training, and sort of comparing dancers then to my dancing now, and the dancing of everyone else in my class a while ago. Apparently, if there was a time machine, the dancers from back when I started dancing would look like a Novice/Prizewinner compared to champs today (which I think he meant as a compliment to me, as though to say I would have qualified for something if I had started a decade sooner), due to how much better dancers have become. This is sort of proved by the steps I’ve been learning, in that I can look up recital videos from when I started, and see the champs doing earlier versions of some of the steps I’m now learning, or learned in the past. There were definitely fewer steps available to learn at my dance school in the grades when I started compared to now. I’m probably about on-par with some of the champs of yesterday, but then, I go to feisanna, or even just class, and see other people’s dancing, and suddenly neither those role models’ dancing nor my own looks that good anymore.

Which, it’s great that so many people are trying to better the art form, and so many champs look amazing. But, like the dresses, I think we really should take care to make sure that it doesn’t become so different that it would be unrecognizable, or more easily recognized as another type of dance, or at least realize that is possibly what we are doing to Irish dance.

I doubt those girls in ages past with hair combed and curled for Mass, dressed in their Sunday best, would recognize what Irish dance has turned into with CLRG. I’m not saying I hate what it has turned into- quite the opposite, I love dance- just saying it is different.

This had drifted away from the original post a bit (and become somewhat long and unwieldy – Tumblr isn’t the best platform for extended discussion), but I think there’s a lot to be discussed about how Irish dance has developed. Like you guys said earlier, it tends to only get brought up in confrontational articles about how it’s all gone downhill, and that puts people on the defensive. It’s nice to have an honest and nuanced discussion about how it’s changed. 

To me, if you take the art out of dance you have something more like artistic gymnastics, dispite its name. If you take the sport out of dance it becomes a living art exhibit. Dance is, well, dance.

As for the development of Irish dance, to me it’s alot like the 4 minute mile. Scientists said it was physically impossible but now any top male runner can do it. As we physically improve our training techniques and methods, the line of impossibility will move.

I think as far as long term health goes, it’s something that is improving, unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be quite in time for people around my age. My last teacher was younger and had studied other things to bring to irish dance to reduce injuries and long term strain. She didn’t teach turn out first; she taught spine, hip and knee alignment first. She had a ballet teacher come in to teach specific drills and the joints, ligaments, bones that were used in each one. She focus on the mental side of competition as well.

Shannon Bradley and Alanah Murray tie for 1st place!