In online communities centered on dances with strong traditions, there are inevitably many complaints and much consternation over what people perceive to be the dying of their art.
Now, dancing as a form of expression is frequently compared to languages, and it seems to me that this analogy works very well here. Languages also change, in fact somewhat inevitably so, either from erosion over time or from changes in the environment or what have you. After a long enough time, the language may have completely transformed into a whole new beast, into something no longer mutually intelligible with what it started out as.
I think the safest thing to do, both in linguistics and in the art of dancing, is to accept this process as a fact of life. That the young folk will tear down what the old folks put up, to make room for whatever suits them instead, and in so doing will redefine what is right. And then their kids will turn on them and do the same all over again.
The good news is that just because new trends appear and generations disagree, the old ways are not going to be banned from existence. There will still be those who speak old dialects, unable to comprehend the secret code employed by today’s zoomers, who only know internet slang and English loan-words. We can’t stop the kids from doing what they want, but they can’t stop us either.
The old ways will still exist for those who love them, and crucially, they will be available to those who want to learn them. There are still people studying old French, and even Latin, just as there are people studying literary modern French, or even street slang and Verlan. However, it makes little sense to speak one of these to someone practicing one of the other. It might be fun to sprinkle in the odd word or phrase from a different dialect or language here or there, for flavor and spice (as a matter of fact, good writers do this all the time), but trying to communicate with someone you don’t really understand is just awkward.