Hyperreal

I went to see a preview of “Mad Hot Ballroom” this morning. Our Salsa teacher had been given a load of tickets and gave them to any of her students who were interested.

Put frankly, you’d have to be keen to get up on a cold Sunday morning to go see a documentary about a bunch of kids learning to dance.

Ten years ago ballroom dancing was introduced into the curriculum at two primary schools in New York for the fifth grade classes (eleven-year olds.) Now it is taught in 60 schools across the city. At the end of the ten-week course schools can choose to enter a team of their students in a competition against other schools. This is the story of three of those schools, tracking the progress of the students as they learn and compete.

As a dancer, this movie is just magical. Watching them learning takes you back to when you were just starting out (in my case only 9 months ago!) The expressions on their faces are a wonder to behold. Then when you listen to them talking about their partners they have to dance with, you realise that either they are very grown up, or we’re just big kids really. Of course, there’s plenty of the “oh, that’s so cute” kids talk made famous by countless TV programmes. There’s also lots of inspirational teachers and parents that you want to go and shake hands with.

Although they’re all taking it seriously, it’s not like a spelling bee or child beauty pageant with lots of pushy parents and arguably abused kids – probably because they are competing in a team, rather than as individuals. The kids shown all seemed to enjoy being taught to dance, and the ones chosen to complete are all (with one exception) enthusiastic and keen to do well.

There’s many who’ll tell you that competitions are evil, and that making kids compete is even more evil. I’m very much in two minds about this.

On the pro side, it worked as a great motivation. Kids are naturally competitive (especially boys) and so they worked a lot harder to do well than they would if there was no real point to what they were doing (in their eyes, at least.) With the girls, even if they didn’t all have the competitive spirit, they relished the opportunity to improve their dancing.

On the negative side, we never got to find out how the people who weren’t picked for the team thought about it. One team when they were knocked out before the finals were absolutely devastated, with most of the girls in tears (along with their teacher, who spent much of the film in tears.) Perhaps that experience will put some of them off dancing for life.

When I was a similar age I was in my school choir and we went to compete in the county school’s choir competition. I don’t remember much about it, beyond that we came second. I can’t say it has scarred me for life. It does make me wonder though, what I’d be like as a singer now. Probably dreadful.

The format of the competition was that each team was made up of 5 couples, one for each of the five dances taught – merengue, tango, fox-trot, swing, and rumba – plus a reserve couple who had to be able to do all dances in case of illness. During each dance the couples appeared to just be repeating a set routine, rather than freestyling. They also were counted in to each dance, sometimes counted through the dance, and then told when to stop. At each stage the team were placed in one of bronze, silver or gold, with the gold teams going through. I’m not sure how the teams in the final felt being given bronze when worse teams in previous rounds had been given silver. Everyone who competed won something though…

In the final three teams were judged as “gold”, and there was a dance-off to decide the winner. This was done by picking the couple from two random styles, and asking them to dance two other styles. A clever way, I thought, of judging the real talent of the dancers, rather than their ability to have a single dance routine drilled into them.

I was impressed by the skill of many of the young dancers. They had only been taught this stuff for 10 weeks, mostly to a formula, but you could see the ones who had a natural talent. They were allowed to develop aspects of their own styling that really worked well for them. I know I’ve said this sort of thing before, but some of them looked better dancing than many more experienced dancers you’ll see regularly at Ceroc venues. (I was watching out for style tips myself! )

Overall, a very good film, and I’d recommend it to all dancers, even if they hate competitions. I give it out of 5.

Here’s the web site for the movie if you want to know more. I think it opens across the UK on the 25th.

(Oh, and I’ve got a new recruit or two for Ceroc. In particular, the guy from my salsa class who’s done “2-step jive” is going to come along to JJ’s on Tuesday to see what we’re all about. Just don’t tell my salsa teacher! Shhh!)