Mad Hot Ballroom

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There was a time in this country, shortly after the disappearance of the one-room schoolhouse, when dance remained a part of school curriculum; I was in the fifth-grade. It was a time when the word “cootie” was in style, and the mere thought of the word “bitch” could bring to ones taste buds the savory opulence of a variety of soaps flavors: Ivory was my personal favorite. It was the late ‘50's, and kids my age had at least one or two classes in dance. Today, a time when most school systems have placed a financial moratorium on the arts, Mad Hot Ballroom is a refreshing, though somewhat poorly defined, film about teaching ballroom dance to inner-city kids.

In 2003 writer/producer Amy Sewell contacted independent film maker Marilyn Agrelo to work on a documentary about 60 schools in the NYC school system that require students to take a 10-week ballroom dance course. Sewell had written an article for the Tribeca Trib on the subject earlier and had felt: limited by the space she was allowed, and encouraged to expand the subject by what she witnessed.

The documentary tracks three of the 60 schools in the program with up-close interviews and unobtrusive camera work creating a riotous parade of kids in ballroom dance competition. There are numerous moments: amusing, interesting and touching, with the adults while the main characters, the students, are left mostly to “kids say the darndest things” chatter. The overall feel is fun and funny, but it is also a poignant illustration of how far we’ve traveled yet still remain the same. At one point Tara, all of 11 years-old, speaks quite frankly about her future and how she’s got the “right stuff” to make it in show business. This conversation is closely followed by a group of pre- pubescent boys whose primary struggle in life is to make eye-contact with their dance partners but debate knowingly the differences between the sexes and whose the “hottest” girl in the dance program.

There are so many hilarious and heartwarming moments in this film that it’s easy to forgive the lack of direction and structural elements that could have made it the “Spellbound,” of this year. To Sewell’s credit this is truly an interesting topic, and despite the fact that the pacing becomes corrupted by the inability of the director to draw certain elements tightly around the core of this unusual experiment, it still maintains enough forward momentum to get us to the end; the city-wide dance contest. There is discussion throughout the film about how this program has changed the lives of many at-risk kids, and here, at the end of the film, one can’t help but feel what the loss of art in our school programs has cost us.

We have followed three schools and only one has made it to the finals–PS 115 (Washington Heights)–the most problematic of the three. A school dominated by underprivileged Dominican immigrants in one of the poorest sections of the city, a place where anything good is welcome respite from what goes in the real world. And here, at the end, the place of recognition, we watch as “our kids” compete. This is the real success of the film. At some point we have adopted these poor kids and this revived program. And, as we hold our breaths for the judges decision, we can’t help but wonder why we no longer teach our children to dance.