The grainy high school dance video is lurid.
A teenage boy dances behind his winter-formal date, hands on her hips, thrusting his pelvis against her while she hitches up her satiny gown and bends at the waist. Another couple dance facing each other, their bodies enmeshed and their hips gyrating in a frenzy. A boy approaches a third couple, nearly sandwiching the girl between himself and her partner.
Teenagers call it "freaking," a style of dance made popular on MTV. Educators call it "simulated sex" that has no place at school dances. This clash between outraged adults and sexualized teens is being played out at homecoming dances, winter formals and proms across the nation, most recently at Aliso Niguel High School in Aliso Viejo.
After a jungle-themed dance in September, Principal Charles Salter canceled all future dances until students, parents and administrators craft a plan to stop freak dancing.
For months he'd implored parents to get their children to stop freaking, and even showed a video of the school dance to hundreds of parents at back-to-school night.
"The 'dancing' of our youngsters today is one step from events that should be occurring on wedding nights," he wrote in an e-mail to parents.
Though forms of freak dancing -- also called "grinding" or "the nasty" -- first appeared years ago, so many students are doing it now that educators nationwide are drawing up rules of behavior, changing music formats away from freak-friendly hip-hop, and banning from dances students whose movements are deemed too sexual.
"Of all the things that happen at a high school, having to spend so much time on dances -- that's out of whack," said Kelly Godfrey, principal of Los Alamitos High School in Orange County.
Some students say a crackdown on freaking would discourage them from attending school dances.
"I wouldn't go," said Chelsea Walsh, 15, a sophomore at Aliso Niguel High. "It would be boring. How else do you dance?"
*
When the waltz was first performed at a royal British ball in 1816, the Times of London wrote: "So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society ... we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion."
Similar generational clashes over the tango, the twist and Elvis Presley's gyrating hips followed; the theme was celebrated in the 1984 movie "Footloose."
