Chelsea Spear
According to US News and World Reports, arts education among K-12 students can contribute to kids’ success in school. Arts and theatre programs impart vital skills like teamwork, focus, and the ability to take constructive criticism, and they can also give students who struggle something that can motivate them to go to school in the first place. Unfortunately, art classes are one of the first things to get cut in financial recessions, and organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts have been all but eliminated in the current federal budget hearings.
Before any House Republicans sign off on the budget, they might want to watch Mad Hot Ballroom. This 2005 documentary follows fourth graders in New York as they enroll in a ballroom dancing course that ends in an all-city competition. As they progress from learning dance steps to competing with other schools—eventually being judged by talents like Ann Reinking and Graciela Daniele—they put important life lessons into play.
Mad Hot Ballroom focuses on three elementary schools that represent the different populations of the five boroughs: upper-class students in Tribeca, working-class students in Bensonhurst, and a predominantly Dominican student body in Washington Heights, many of whom, as their principal notes, live near the poverty line. The kids work with instructors from Dancing Classrooms, an organization that had, at the time of the film’s release, collaborated with the New York public school system for a decade.
The instructors are our first perspective into the classes and its effects on the kids. Rodney Lopez, who works with the Washington Heights students, meets the kids where they are by irreverently asking them to tuck in their shirts. Over in Tribeca, Pierre Dulaine addresses the pupils from a more elevated perspective, holding his head high and guiding them in an even voice through his exacting standards. As we start to see how ballroom dancing will affect the students, director Marilyn Agrelo and editor Sabine Krayenbuhl include more of the kids’ conversations with one another, and their observations about dance give way to their concerns about their families and their futures. The candor of their conversations, which touch upon their parents’ marriages, the creepy men in their extended families, and the likelihood that they will be abducted, can be jarring when contrasted with the film’s more lighthearted tone, but they also show how the support system of their ballroom dancing classes has given them a sense of stability.
As we hear more from the kids, we also start to see the world from their perspective. Cinematographer Claudia Raschke transitions from shooting the opening scenes at the teachers’ eye view to getting the interviews with a lower angle and showing us the world through the kids’ eyes. Krayenbuhl edits the scenes with the kids in longer takes, and these moments of languor remind viewers of how slowly time passes when you’re in the single digits.
Agrelo has a good eye for seemingly throwaway moments that show how the kids develop. One scene opens with a student dancing before a mirror in her hometown, her angular, Britney Spears-influenced steps incorporating and eventually morphing into swing dancing. In another scene, two boys talk to the camera about how their religious beliefs prevent them from participating in these classes as dancers, and that they DJ the dances instead. This kind of not-an-issue involvement shows how the arts can allow students to belong even if they didn’t think they had a place.
Mad Hot Ballroom was made a few years after 9/11, and Agrelo addresses this in throwaway moments that her young subjects would understand. For those who remember what New York looked like before 2001, the occasional skyline shots are as defined by the absence of the Twin Towers as they are by the other iconic skyscrapers. (At one point towards the end of the film, Rodney Lopez gestures towards the skyline and says, of the Twin Towers, “I can’t believe they’re gone.”) The use of digital video also grounds the viewer in the early 2000s, and the saturated primary colors and smeary picture quality might make some viewers long for the days when films that made the most of consumer-grade electronics would screen at prestigious film festivals.
On its 2005 release, Mad Hot Ballroom had the second highest-grossing box office gross for a documentary, just behind March of the Penguins. The film’s legacy has not only extended to its earnings or the rewards it earned, but also to its impact on the role of the arts in public schools; at least two ballroom dance programs inspired by Dancing Classrooms have flourished in Ontario, Canada and Wisconsin.
On its own, Mad Hot Ballroom is a charming documentary about the impact of ballroom dancing on a few classes of Manhattan schoolchildren. Seeing it now, with the budget cuts and layoffs at our national public institutions, is a vision of the role arts education has played in the United States, and the role it could play again.
“Mad Hot Ballroom” is streaming on Hoopla and available for digital rental or purchase.
