School ball season is in full swing. But, for all its thrills and spills, is it still relevant? Bruce Munro asks former Moreau College pupil Clare Curran and St Hilda’s Collegiate School principal Jackie Barron to conjugate the past, present and future of the school ball.
Clare Curran has vivid memories of her seventh form school formal, 45 years ago. In 1977, the now former Dunedin South Member of Parliament was a sometimes recalcitrant school pupil in her final year at Moreau College. Two years prior, the city’s two Catholic girls schools had merged, forcing a 15-year-old Curran to make a daily trek across town to the school on Anderson’s Bay Rd.
"Us Saint Dom’s girls were mourning the loss of our school identity," Curran recalls.
She did not go to her first Moreau College formal the next year, choosing instead the then-Kaikorai Valley High School ball.
"It was very exciting. I can't remember the name of my partner, but he was lovely and we had a great night. We went to a party afterwards."
Come her seventh form year, however, Curran got fully involved in planning the Moreau formal.
"I was a prime organiser for the formal. In fact, it's the only thing I really remember about my miserable seventh form year."
It was an exciting time to be a teenager, Curran says. United Kingdom punk rock bands were ascendant and nascent Dunedin Sound garage bands were beginning to find their voice.
"I enlisted the help of a guy with lots of artistic talent to help me design the theme. It was black and white. We created silhouettes of Phoebe Snow and other musicians.
"The music and lighting were important and I'm pretty sure we controlled all of that."
Alcohol was prohibited, but invariably some people sneaked it past the school’s nuns who, along with others, were acting as security on the door. "I took my boyfriend, Jeremy H. I remember wearing a creamy white, full skirt and a black top.
"Makeup wasn't a big thing in those days. Well not for me, other than black lipstick and eyeliner."
School Ball season is in full swing in the South.
Kicked off by Blue Mountain College back on May 20, at least a quarter of Otago’s 23 secondary schools have already had their annual senior school formal. That includes Lawrence Area School, which also invites Year 12 and 13 pupils from eight other small rural high schools. The most recent balls, this past weekend, were the South Otago High School and Columba College formals.
The next few weeks will see another dozen or more balls, often the highlight of the school year. Of the schools that responded to questions from The Weekend Mix, Otago Boys High School (OBHS) alone did not have a set date, promising only that it will be "sometime next term".
The last school ball on the 2022 calendar, as far as The Mix is aware, will be the John McGlashan College formal, on September 17 - bringing the curtain down on almost four months of region-wide hormone, hair and hip-hop-fuelled, youthful angst and excitement.
Young people at the Moreau College Black & White Rock Dance, 1981. Above left: The Clean were still six months off releasing what would become their hit debut single Tally Ho when they played the Moreau College Black & White Dance, in March, 1981, admission $2.50. The Orange and Look Blue, Go Purple headlined the Moreau College Black & White Rock Dance in 1984. PHOTOS: VERONICA MOLLOY. VERONICA MOLLOY. KERRY DAVIS
SCHOOL balls have long been an important part of the secondary school calendar, Jackie Barron, principal of St Hilda’s Collegiate School, says. Her school’s formal began life as a debutante ball, almost a century ago.
"So, it started as... a way to meet young men in a chaperoned environment."
Records suggest the first St Hilda’s dance to which the girls could invite a partner was in 1933.
"Prior to that I think the boys from the boarding schools - probably John McGlashan and Otago Boys - just got herded over, whether they wanted to go or not."
Back then the St Hilda’s "debs", were presented to Dunedin’s Anglican Bishop as a formal part of "coming out" during the ball season. Ballroom dancing was an important social element of the night.
"Formal dances like the Gay Gordon and Snowball Waltz were all designed to change partners, to help you meet people ...[at a time] when young woman really didn't get an opportunity to get out much unless it was a chaperoned dance."
St Hilda’s dropped dance lessons and formal dancing about seven years ago.
"It's a student driven event ... Now we have a sit-down meal and then there's a DJ, and they have a great time dancing."
Fashion has always played a big part in school balls, particularly for young women. The floor-length, pure-white ball gowns and long white gloves that held sway until the 1950s are now a rainbow-array of colours, hip-high splits and bared backs.
Keeping up with ever-shifting fads only adds to the cost.
Across Otago, ball tickets this year average $88 per person, and normally include a meal or rolling supper. Best value, at $60, were the Lawrence Area School and South Otago High School formals. At the top end, tickets for St Hilda’s late-May ball were $115 and tickets for McGlashan’s will be "under $300 a double".
Add shoes, hair and make-up to the price of a ticket (or two), as well as this season’s couture styling, and the cost of attending a school formal can be closer to $1000 than $500.
For a while, in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, frugal formal wear made an appearance. In 2009, the Otago Daily Times reported Kaikorai Valley College pupils, including Moselle Storm, were making their own ball outfits.
"Velvet's quite expensive. I'd expect to pay about $200 for the same dress as mine, [which was] $30," Storm said at the time.
Since then, Barron has noticed an ongoing trend towards capping ball costs.
"In the past 10 years, students have gotten a lot more pragmatic. .. There used to be a massive cost around buying a dress, and the boys would hire a suit.
"Now, girls are hiring a dress or borrowing a dress from someone else, or they're wearing a dress they can wear to other functions. I think that's practical and sensible."
Even so, a school formal remains "reasonably expensive", Barron admits.
With that in mind, she took an unusual step before the planning for this year’s school formal started. Barron asked her pupils whether they still wanted a ball.
"We don't want to keep just asking people to fork out money for an event that actually has no relevance and doesn't actually meet the needs of our students done it, but that's actually not a very good reason to keep doing something. It has to have a purpose."
The pupils’ response was a resounding "yes".
The young people’s reasoning behind their response points to the reality that school balls, while maintaining some important threads with the past, have changed, not just in form, but in function.
Clockwise from top left: Drea Gong at the Otago Girls’ High School formal, in 2017. OGHS 2017 formal attendees (from left) Leimanu Hotesi, Priyanka Poulton, Viena Nika and Nandita Hela. A couple photographed at a formal during the 1980s. St Hilda’s Debutantes, all in floor-length pure white dresses and long white gloves, at their "coming out" ball, in 1948. James Spivey and Ryken Louden at the 2021 Waitaki Boys’ and Girls’ High School combined formal. PHOTO: GRAVITY EVENTS. KELK PHOTOGRAPHY. ODT FILES. ST HILDA’S COLLEGIATE
ABOUT 280 young people attended St Hilda’s formal this year. Only King’s High School’s and McGlashan’s formals would be larger, potentially peaking at about 300. The average is 190. Offering an intimate formal experience were Kaikorai Valley College and Lawrence Area School, with 85 and 90 attendees respectively.
If pupils are bringing a partner, same-sex or not, St Hilda’s staff check the prospective partner’s school would "endorse that student being at our function".
More young people, however, are choosing to attend without a partner, Barron says.
"They’re possibly changing those heteronormative structures that are binary, that you have to take a boy or a girl to a dance. That could be becoming less relevant for today's young people.
"I think that's about being comfortable with their friends. And maybe, sometimes inviting someone you don't know that well can be a bit challenging.
"So, no not all students want to take a partner. They just want to go with their friends get dressed up, have a meal, have a dance and feel a bit grown up."
The debutante-era term "coming out" has kept a curious currency, Barron says.
"As I said to the girls, ‘coming out’ as a debutante for ‘the season’ - the whole meaning of that phrase has changed. Though there's probably some similarities in terms of saying, ‘Hey, this is who I am’ and ‘Please accept me for who I am’.
In that sense, the role of the school formal as a rite of passage is as relevant as ever.
"[It is] about an opportunity ... in a safe and structured environment to make that transition to adulthood. They're getting dressed up. They're hosting a partner who they have to look after and introduce to other people. They have to introduce them to me and the deans ... a bit like introducing them to all the aunties or whatever. So it's quite formal. There's a meal. They need to have those social skills around dining, and then going off and dancing."
From the schools’ perspective, formals seem to have become a more fraught event.
The rise of social media - allowing instant global broadcasting of ball-goers’ thrills and spills from (on average) 190 different possible digital devices - coupled with increasing concern in an education market economy about "reputational risk", appears to be making some schools wonder whether formals are worth the headaches.
Especially when some of the potential trouble is outside your control, AKA the after-ball party.
In the past, some of the region’s secondary schools have responded to criticism by trying to point out they were not responsible for after-parties. Others, such as OBHS, have tried to stamp them out.
In 2016, OBHS rector Richard Hall said his school did not tolerate after-parties.
"We don't have after-parties. I brought back the formal [after a one-year break] on the condition that we don't have an after-ball. It was the first thing we discussed with pupils," Hall said.
Schools in the North Island have been known to employ security guards, breathalyzer tests, drug dogs and pat downs to screen which princes and princesses got to go to the ball.
Last month it was reported Auckland inner-city residents had called for school balls to be banned from Mt Eden stadium , deeming the noise and bad behaviour a "complete nightmare".
Certainly, in 2022, schools would be unlikely to even consider what Moreau College did for several years after Curran’s 1977 formal.
Her successful black and white-themed ball, featuring local musicians, seems to have spawned what former Moreau College pupil Liz Knowles has described as "the maybe-famous-at-one-time-in-Dunedin, Black and White Rock Dance".
Curran can only recall a school formal. But, from the late-1970s until about the mid-1980s, the school had both an annual ball and a yearly Black and White dance.
The latter was open to pupils from all Dunedin secondary schools.
"It was a super exciting can’t sleep-for-all-the-excitement event for a Catholic all-lass school," Knowles says.
"Tickets were sold to all other high school students and always sold out. The evening featured live bands, a bar - non-alcoholic but probably with the always-popular bonus K-bars and meat pasties - and, of course, live Dunedin musicians rocking on the stage."
The Clean, the most influential band to come from the Flying Nun label, played the Black and White dance in March, 1981, six months before releasing what would become their hit debut single Tally Ho.
Dunedin’s all-women alternative rock band, Look Blue Go Purple, played the dance in 1984 on their way to two Top-40 albums, Bewitched and LBGPEP2, in 1985 and 1986. The Orange played the same gig. Its songwriter and vocalist was Andrew Brough, who later joined Straitjacket Fits.
Taking responsibility for pupils from dozens of different schools seems unimaginable now. The potential problems associated with their own pupils and their partners have become too much for some schools, Barron says.
"A lot of schools don't have formals or balls anymore. They can be problematic. You can have students who can make some poor choices. Maybe it's a Southern thing; Otago and Southland. We've held on to those kinds of formal traditions."
But Barron believes the restrictions schools place on ball attendees and their behaviour is foremost driven by something other than public relations "optics".
"It’s about student safety ... It's about respecting themselves and each other. And it's about respecting the fact the school is making the effort to host this event.
"I always say to them, if you're the sort of person who cannot get through a function or an event without alcohol or drugs, then the school formula is not the place for you."
It is not called a formal for no reason.
"It's not a party ...We want it to be a learning opportunity for you; we want to treat you like young adults.
"You can have a great night with your friends without alcohol and drugs. And if this is the one place where you get to do it, and you can be safe, then we're happy to provide that opportunity."
Looking back, Curran says school balls appear to have lost something.
"Observing my sons and my niece attend formals in the [past few years], the focus is much more on the dress, the hair and make-up. For me, it was about the theme, the music and having a good time."
But looking ahead, she believes if they can ditch the superficial, then school formals have a healthy future.
"It's an annual rite-of-passage event for students to socialise together ...It's not a beauty contest.
"It should be inclusive and be about celebrating young people becoming adults and expressing themselves."
