Starring: documentary film
Director: Marilyn Agrelo
Rated: PG
ONE of the benefits of the new genre of reality television is that audiences today are more prepared to be entertained by the documentation of actual events, featuring ordinary people instead of actors, than they were 10 years ago.
This has breathed new life into the documentary feature, and enabled films such as Mad Hot Ballroom to screen in mainstream cinemas and become hits worldwide.
Of course, there’s something special about ballroom dancing.
Fred and Ginger danced their way into cinema history, and in the wake of Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom (1992) and other films about ballroom dancing (such as Masayuki Suo’s 1995 film Shall We Dance, remade in 2004 with Richard Gere, and Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson (1997), this social and increasingly competitive dance form is experiencing a huge revival, especially on television (Strictly Dancing, Dancing with the Stars).
Ballroom dancing is exacting. It sets up a dialogue between the music and the dancing couple, who must learn to become creative within strict rules.
Add the crucial ingredient of teaching ballroom dancing as a lesson in life to deprived 10-year-old public school children in multicultural New York, and what you have is an inspirational, highly entertaining movie that makes you smile.
Mad Hot Ballroom focuses on three New York City primary schools competing in a ballroom dancing competition organised by the American Ballroom Theatre’s Dancing Classes program.
The program was introduced to New York primary schools 10 years ago and provides professional instruction in American-style ballroom dancing to 5th graders, who are encouraged and supported by classroom teachers who see the program as instilling in their students not simply team spirit and discipline, but pride, creativity, and a sense of self-worth.
Out of the 60 schools that in 2004 enrolled in the American Ballroom Theatre’s 10-week course of dancing classes, 48 schools elected to compete in the competition that results in the winning team of five couples receiving the much coveted Challenge Trophy.
In her debut feature as a director, Marilyn Agrelo follows several students from three schools taking part in the program, which consists of 20 one-hour dancing lessons.
The children begin from scratch, and what Agrelo captures on screen as they work their way through the repertoire and are transformed into “ladies and gentlemen” through their mastery of the rumba, tango, foxtrot, merengue, and swing, is not only fascinating but irrepressibly joyful.
All the children come from richly varied backgrounds.
But Tribeca Public School’s 5th graders are the most trendy and confident, with some of them, like curly-headed, diminutive Cyrus, exhibiting a surprising precocity and articulateness.
Washington Heights Public School is more downmarket. The children wear plain uniforms and come from a migrant, mainly Domenican neighbourhood.
But these children are the most revelatory, particularly Wilson, a shy newcomer with virtually no English, whose rhythmic hip-swaying rumba with his elegant partner Jatnna is exhilarating.
Bensonhurst Public School in Brooklyn is also rich with personalities. These children, from Asian and Italian-American families, are good natured and outgoing, and their lives are transformed by the opportunity to excel.
Mad Hot Ballroom sets out to show the American Dream in action – the belief of dedicated New York teachers that America is still a land of limitless opportunity where individuals can go as far as their own merit takes them.
Marilyn Agrelo’s excellent film shows that given the opportunity, in this case provided by the non-profit Dancing Classes program, this can still be the case.
