Hello, good readers —
What makes a good dance movie? Is it the quality of the on-screen dancing? The insights it gives us into the world where the dancing takes place, whether that’s a Broadway audition or a Tampa strip club or the fertile mind of an aspiring star who just murdered her lover? Does a good dance movie even need much of a plot or a supporting structure, as long as the dance sequences are excellent?
A few weeks ago, Rotten Tomatoes asked me to put together a list of the best and most essential dance movies of all time, to mark the 20th anniversary of Save the Last Dance, which is today.
Save the Last Dance is part of a mini-crop of dance movies that came out in the first five or six years of this century (think Center Stage, Step Up, You Got Served, and, depending on how you classify cheerleading, Bring It On). It stars Julia Stiles as Sarah, a white aspiring ballet dancer from the midwestern suburbs, whose mother dies on the day of a crucial audition, after which she goes to live with her estranged jazz musician father in Chicago, where she attends a mostly Black high school and falls in love with Derrick, the college-bound brother (Sean Patrick Thomas) of her new friend Chenille (Kerry Washington, 23 years old, in one of her first film roles, and so clearly a superstar waiting to happen). Derrick teaches Sarah to dance hip hop, and Chenille teaches her about white privilege. In the end, Sarah gets into her dream performing arts school after auditioning with a hybrid ballet-hip hop number and we all pretend not to notice the obvious cuts between Julia Stiles and Julia Stiles’s body double.
Of all the dance movies that came out around this time, STLD has the least dancing on offer, and the dancing it does feature is… look, they tried. As I said in my brief essay for Rotten Tomatoes, this movie is a reminder that while it can be hard to find actors who can really dance, or dancers who can really act, it’s usually worth the trouble.
Still, unlike a lot of the dance movies from its crop, it had something explicit to say about race and racism, although it leaves a lot of what it has to say — about the rigidity, whiteness, and femininity of ballet vs. the “realness,” Blackness, and masculinity of hip hop — unsaid. That’s a mistake, because it feeds stereotypes about ballet and Blackness as antithetical, stereotypes that make life difficult for Black ballet dancers, and especially for Black girls and women. This is a movie that namechecks Richard Wright and James Baldwin in the first twelve minutes of screen time, and that gives Chenille a monologue about the lie of colorblindness and equal opportunity. An explicit reckoning with the stereotypes about who dances ballet and who does hip hip wouldn’t have been out of place.
I didn’t put STLD on my list of essential dance movies, and the tomatometer agreed with me, even if it didn’t back some of my other choices. I wanted A Chorus Line and Magic Mike XXL in the top two spots, and it wanted Singin’ in the Rain and Dance Academy: The Comeback. No offense to Gene Kelly, but he’s no Channing Tatum. But here’s a video of each of them, so you don’t have to choose.
That’s it from me this week. Thank you, as always, for reading.
Chloe.