5, 6, 7 8: Dance Movie Musings

Most of us have seen a dance movie or two in our time. Being a lifelong lover of dance, I have seen many. But what, you might ask, makes a great dance movie? I revisit some old and new favourites in pursuit of an answer.  

Singin’ in the Rain (1952) 

My first and most treasured introduction to dance film was unsurprisingly the godfather of tap dance, Gene Kelly. Even though I can’t remember ever attending a tap class as a young ballet devotee, I was fascinated with his rhythm. His footwork is enough to, as the song goes, get you ‘all a-quiver’. Kelly looped around streetlamps and hopped across the raining streets with flash lightning pace, a charming grin upon his face, making it all look like light work. The strength of this film was also its old Hollywood hilarity, as the female protagonist, Lina, tries desperately to train her voice melodically for the new “talky” films, after making her name as a silent film actor. Her shrieking voice as she tries to sing and read her lines is, quite literally, a scream.  

A highly entertaining song and dance is made of her awful diction as Kelly dances with Donald O’Connor, the elocution teacher, to the absurd tongue twister, ‘Moses Supposes His Toeses are Roses’. It is an annoyingly catchy rhythm, which is the hallmark of a good dance film.  

The Red Shoes (1948) 

The Red Shoes is widely regarded as the film that made the ballet film genre. It follows the story of Victoria Page (played by Moira Shearer), a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale ballerina who joins the world-renowned Ballet Lermontov, named after the ballet master, who tests her dedication by making her choose between her career and love, ultimately dancing herself to death. The director, Michael Powell, said himself that the central theme of the film was ‘about dying for art … that art is worth dying for’. I think it’s fair to say that this film is ballet trauma on the silver screen and paved the way for Darren Aronovsky’s Black Swan, a film that explores an obsessive/competitive relationship between two principal dancers in Swan Lake. Tortured and erotic, Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis in this film were responsible for my bisexual awakening. The difference between this old ballet misery memoir and the modern version is the lack of erotic undertones and opulence and ‘staginess’ of The Red Shoes set, and the wide and aerial shots and Tinseltown feel. But both Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes and Natalie Portman in Black Swan do an exceptionally decent job at playing a neurotic, semi-psychotic ballet dancer caught in a shadowy world of mirrors and artifice. Not the bright and breezy vibes of Singin’ in the Rain. Another thing that is notable is that Moira Shearer was an actual ballet dancer, as well as an actor, whereas Natalie Portman did a short course in ballet and had a dancer body double for many of the scenes. This demonstrates how far drama has diverged from dance in contemporary cinema, whereas many old Hollywood movie stars were accomplished dancers and singers alongside their acting.   

Flashdance (1983) 

Look. The ‘80s seriously turned up the heat on the dance film genre. The scene in Flashdance where Alex, a steel worker aspiring to gain entry to dance college, dances around the studio in a crop top and shorts, sweat dripping from her curly hair is just pure steam. This film shows raw dedication and passion for dance, be it (again) with a little help from a body double, but Beales’ big brown eyes, tousled mane, and feisty soul as she shimmies in next to nothing across the dance studio in front of a desk full of stuffy judges is pure cinematic magic.  

Dirty Dancing (1987) 

As I say, the eighties were all about sex appeal, and the dance film realm echoes this with gusto. Dirty Dancing follows the story of a young dancer, “Baby”, who falls in love with her male dance instructor. In a scene that particularly blows the thermometer, Baby arrives at Johnny’s cabin late at night, to find him with his shirt off, the scene quickly progressing into some *dirty* dancing. The film has a complex plotline and, as feminist author Melissa McEwan points out, is not simply a ‘dance’ film, but a film about women’s bodies and their autonomy over their sexuality, offering feminist insights into class, desire, abuse, and abortion. Again, something that I may have thought was ‘just a dance film’ as a teen strikes me as so much more now, and I recognise was formative in my adolescence.  

Billy Eliot (2000)  

I was a ten-year-old when I first saw Billy Eliot. At the time, my parents split up and my mum moved us from our sunny lives in the North Island of New Zealand to a gloomy town in the northern United Kingdom not unlike the post-industrial dereliction of the film’s setting. As such, I could really relate to the joy that dance was giving Billy in the absence of sunlight and, at times, the absence of hope in his family situation. My favourite scene is when his chain-smoking dance teacher dances with him to ‘We Love to Boogie’ by T-Rex in the crumby old school hall. They are both a picture of joy as they escape the grim reality of every day through interpretive dance. Seeing him soar across the Royal Opera House stage at the end of the film in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake was the first moment that I imagined my dreams of being a professional dancer were achievable and inspired much of my following teenage years of devoted ballet training.  

They’ve got the moves: a conclusion 

I could have listed many more dance films that have a special place in my heart and get my dancing feet moving, but time and space does not permit. A common theme with all these films is the joy and love of dance, at whatever cost, as a transcendent artform that is available to all of us, whether we are a child or an adult, trained or untrained…. Wherever we are in place and time. For this reason, dance films are uniquely moving (excuse the pun) and make for great nostalgic cinema.