Each summer a small, low-budget, totally endearing movie stands out amidst the storm of blockbusters. So far the prime candidate for summer surprise is Mad Hot Ballroom, which is currently screening at Plaza Frontenac. My wife and I saw it last night. Although I arrived with modest expectations – kids wrongfooting the merengue, too cute – I was completely charmed.
Mad Hot Ballroom documents students’ and their teachers’ preparations for an annual ballroom-dance competition held for New York City public-schools. The dance program is designed to raise students’ self-esteem, to teach them how to cooperate and interact with others in civil ways -- especially those of the opposite sex, and to provide alternative approaches to life other than the lure of gangbanging and drugs that is much too prevalent in the city (and in the country, too, for that matter). One teacher puts it best, as she says tearfully “I’m seeing them turn into ladies and gentlemen.”
Mad Hot Ballroom shows that metamorphosis, and it is quietly moving, funny, inspiring, heartbreaking, and entertaining. The children are captured with revealing intimacy as they describe their hopes and fears. The teachers are heroic, giving enormous energy and love to kids who are in most need. Most of the children in the film are living at the poverty level, many of immigrant families, some with few English skills. You see them shine and fail and try, as children need to do.
As we left, I said to my wife that everyone who sees this film should then write their local, state, and federal representatives the next time cuts to arts programs in schools are being debated as “unfortunate, but necessary” since the arts are “extracurricular” or “nonessential” – as the debate always goes. And they should tell them to see this movie to realize how such programs provide the very core of what we want our children to know and become.
And my wife told me, since Mad Hot Ballroom expresses in a creative and compelling way the same goals and values as the SLSO in terms of arts education in the schools, I should blog that sentiment.
