Something deeply discouraging about grown adults is that they look at a group of enthusiastic, talented high school theater students and see controversy instead of potential.
Watertown High School interim superintendent James Feil’s decision to pull the plug on the production of Flashdance feels less like leadership and more like a retreat into a fearful, old-fashioned worldview that has become increasingly disconnected from how education works in the 21st century. The superintendent canceled the production after concerns were raised that the show might be risqué or controversial, even though the high school version had been modified for younger audiences and had already received approval from school administrators and theater staff.
Flashdance is based on the 1983 film about an 18-year-old woman who works as a steel mill welder by day and a nightclub dancer by night, dreaming of becoming a professional ballerina.
This is not really about Flashdance. It is about a puritanical mindset.
It is that same Puritan streak that periodically surfaces in American life and insists that art must always be sanitized, that creativity must always pass through an ideological metal detector, and that students should be protected from ideas, stories, and themes a handful of adults deem uncomfortable. (Anyone recall how the USSR had to make sure every piece of music, or play, or ballet curved to the state’s mission?) The problem is that the Watertown schools are supposed to prepare young people for the world, not hide the world from them.
The irony is hard to miss. The students weren’t asking to stage the 1983 movie. They were preparing a high school adaptation that students say had removed significant elements of the story to make it suitable for a school production. Yet the production was judged not on what it actually was, but on what some people feared it might represent.
What the high school students are learning is why bother taking creative risks at all?
Visual arts all require young people to stretch themselves emotionally and intellectually. That is the point of the programming, right? A school production should not have to survive a moral panic every time someone in the community feels a sensation running up their leg.
Watertown has already endured an embarrassing controversy over banning a musical piece connected to LGBTQ+ history. At some point, district leaders ought to ask themselves what kind of reputation they are building. Is Watertown becoming known as a place where student talent flourishes, or a place where adults continually pull the emergency brake whenever someone complains?
The saddest part is that the people who pay the highest price are not administrators or board members. It is the students.
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