So, you think you can DANCE......

DVD Features

Albert Einstein once declared that 'Dancers are the athletes of God'. Presumably, inventing the Theory of Relativity was easier than anticipating the rise of the Macarena in 1995, when clubbers terrorised dance floors worldwide with an unholy version of the hokey pokey.

   Einstein’s claim did prove one thing – the cinema box office is a more astute judge of dancing talent than he was.
Since Fred Astaire first lit up the screen with Ginger Rogers in 1933, film has charted the evolution of dance’s fads, flops and phenomena. The big screen possesses a Nigel Lythgoe-like ability to expose dance for what it is, and just as often, what it is not.

   So what makes a good dance flick? Julia Cotton, choreographer and Head of Movement at NIDA, believes “the choreography is as important as the talent delivering it, and strong storylines are essential”. For reasons best known to film financiers, Hollywood is not always able to perform this most basic of two-steps.
This month’s Genre Spotlight takes a look at the history of dance in film, and finds that, unlike fine wine, the body in motion can struggle with age.

‘80s Classics

Rebellion, sex appeal and leg warmers powered a golden age of dance movies during the 1980s. Generation-Xers spent weekends bouncing their way out of cinema aisles and onto Blue Light Disco dance floors to rehash moves bigger than Joan Collins’s shoulder pads. If the era taught us something, it was that lauding style over substance is a recipe for cringe-worthy cinema, and doing the worm causes carpet burn.

   Jennifer Beals’s star vehicle Flashdance may have won an Oscar for its soundtrack, but it also garnered a Razzie for worst screenplay. The arc-welding Beals’s most famous scene was lampooned in a beer commercial recently. The beer commercial probably pips the original ever so slightly for entertainment value.

   Dirty Dancing was the mother of all ‘80s dance hits, propelling star Patrick Swayze into the sex symbol stratosphere and taking a whopping $170 million in ticket sales. At the pinnacle of his fame, Swayze revealed just how little he understood about the film’s success and how much of his own hype he bought into when he stated, “Good looking people turn me off. Myself included”.

   The unlikely teaming of Kevin Bacon, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kenny Loggins drove 1984’s Footloose into pop culture folklore – mainly via the ‘I’m going to dance my way out of this teenage angst’ video for Loggins’s eponymous single.
Elsewhere, Oscar winner White Knights eschewed the ‘80s teenage sex appeal angle for some good old fashioned cold-war espionage. The Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnikov title was, however, harder to watch than Russian President Gorbachev’s birthmark.

Urban

1961’s West Side Story remains king of the urban dance jungle nearly five decades after its release. According to Cotton, “filmmaker Jerome Roberts was really breaking new ground” with the musical. The ten-time Oscar winner drew heavily on the aptly named Shake-speare’s Romeo and Juliet, with its tale of love divided by two rival New York gangs. Tough-talk and knife fights ensured the script contained the necessary grit to ensure cross generational appeal.

   Playing second fiddle to Westside Story in the genre would be no great shame. But no other urban dance film manages to come close in terms of originality and substance.

   You could throw a hat over the relative merits of Stomp the Yard, You Got Served and Jessica Alba’s Honey. But their high energy currency has had a tendency to decompose rather pungently within a few years. Step Up and its more successful sequel Step Up 2 the Streets are the best of recent fare, both at least kept audiences interested with their Darth Vader vs. Luke Skywalker stylized dance floor dueling, albeit minus the hand lopping.

   The musical Rent had long been a Broadway staple, but the film of the same name was evicted from cinemas almost as soon as it opened. 2000’s Center Stage took a different route than most urban films with its focus on ballet, but exited stage left before it even managed to pay for itself.

The Fads

It’s well documented that alcohol can make you feel wittier while also upping the sex appeal of anyone you lock eyes with. The effect of a dance fad rendered on film is very similar – both can leave consumers feeling dirty and embarrassed once the buzz wears off. “Fad films are great at a particular time,” says Collins, “but they just don’t age well.”

   Lambada and its evil ‘90s twin The Forbidden Dance would be cases in point. The flat-as-a-slashed-tyre plots sapped any sensuality the gyrating masses might’ve gleaned from the Brazilian-spawned dance style both movies tried to cram down audience’s throats. The hilarious dialogue and suspect casting bordered on criminal. Still, they weren’t as bad as 1988’s Salsa, which proved to be less spicy than brown bread.

   On the other hand, Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom instigated something of a dance fad in Australia. Faster than Paul Mercurio could squeeze into a Bonds singlet, the film that Collins rates as one of her top three made Latin ballroom the de-rigueur in Australia long before the Ricky Martin inspired Latin-American renaissance of the late ‘90s.

   John Travolta’s ‘70s disco dancing powerhouse Saturday Night Fever remains one of the few dance fad movies that has managed to hold its metaphorical pants up. In fact Travolta’s screen worn white polyester held up so well, it sold for $145,000 to a prop collector. With hairy-chested bling, mirror balls and those fancy white flares giving oomph to big John’s flair for movement, the film is perhaps the visual apogee of the disco phenomenon. The memorable closing scene, scored by the Bee Gee’s hit “Staying Alive”, elevates the term ‘strut’ to a Platoesque realm as Travolta man-walks his way down a footpath in a style that is yet to be eclipsed.

   Breakdance: The Movie or Breakin’, depending on which side of the US border you lived, pop-locked its way out of Hollywood in 1984, much to the chagrin of the NYC devotees who’d invented the style, and no doubt cast member Ice-T.
With Hip-Hop still very much in its embryonic stages, a scriptwriter dreamt up ‘cool’ names like Turbo and Ozone to sap any real street-cred currency the movie might have carried. While the dance style slowly came back into vogue, the movie sits comfortably in the bowels of the 1980s, along with Kraftwerk’s soundtrack contribution, “Tour de France”.

Traditional

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers designed, engineered and built the spotlight for traditional song and dance movies. From 1935’s heavenly Top Hat, to the film with the title that proves language isn’t a constant, the Oscar winning The Gay Divorcee, the pair danced poetry into surfaces of every conceivable density.

   Astaire, the icon of style, later went solo, taking his feet to the walls and ceiling in 1951’s Royal Wedding long before Lionel Ritchie transformed the idea into a forgettable cheesy song lyric.

   If Astaire was the original dance king, then Gene Kelly was the prince. Paired with Debbie Reynolds in 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain, Kelly’s dancing feet helped make the film a bona fide icon. Unlike Astaire, Kelly suffered during McCarthy era politics after protesting in Washington as part of a delegation at the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947, but did dance up a storm again in 1980’s Xanadu.

   In the less volatile modern era, the brilliantly scripted Billy Elliot managed to turn bogans into misty-eyed apostates to bullying, while picking up kudos from the Academy with three Oscar nominations. 2001’s Save the Last Dance made ballerinas Sean Patrick Thomas and Julia Stiles hip with MTV’s attention-challenged audience; while Richard Gere tried his hand at boring audiences with his feet in the musical comedy, Shall We Dance, a Japanese remake which also featured flop queen Jennifer Lopez.

   Dance With Me, a movie in the same vein as the former, also rates a notable mention, if only for Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times offering the following description for anyone in possession of a looney-language compass: “a predictable pleasure, and then it has those surprises”.