Should Little Girls Be Can Can Dancers?

Weekend rant - Saturday
I went to the Cheyenne Melodrama last night. During Cheyenne Frontier Days, this Melodrama runs every night. Amateur actors put on a play with a villain to boo, a villainess to hiss, a heroine to sigh for, and a hero to cheer. In between the acts, they have "oleos" in which other people, not in the play, come on and dance and/or sing.

And one of the acts was a troup of 8 or so young girls, dressed in can can dresses and dancing the can can. I'm not sure how old these girls were - maybe from 8 years old to 10 years old?

And they were wearing long dresses, and underneath their dresses they were wearing long, black shorts. This was good, because part of their act was to turn around and lift up their dresses so the audiences could see their behinds, which at least were covered by black shorts rather than black panties. And they did this maneuver several times.

The crowd was appreciative of the girls - it was a family crowd, husbands, wives and kids - and they were cheering more just to give the girls on stage heart, because they were clearly under-rehearsed and half of 'em were looking at the other half in order to remember what they were supposed to do at any given time-

But I was just thinking... was this dance really a good thing to be teaching girls age 8 to 10? That people would cheer you if you turned around and lifted up your dress to show them your underwear? Several times? Next stop for them, the "gentleman's club" known as the Den out on the Colorando/Wyoming border, ten miles out of town, where they'll be cheered even more to bare it all (once they grow up, of course)?

Perhaps I'm making too much of this, but surely the choreographer could have done a dance that didn't necessitate the girls doing that apparently signature move. It sent bad signals all around, as far as I was concerned.