Step Up 2 the Streets

Accompanying my favourite teen-ager to the cinema, for a screening of the long-awaited Step-Up 2 the Streets, I winced to a good part of the beginnings of the movie because I just knew the set-up - the excuse for great dancing called the story line - was going to be long-winded and painful. Bring on the dancing, will ya? In fact it wasn't too bad and I will spare my readers having to read about it and watch it if they ever make it to the film. They toyed with us, but good-naturedly. Just when one is about to get get discouraged, a bit of great dancing comes along. Fine, I'm hooked. I did not visit the rest room or candy shop once throughout the whole thing. They are that good. One doesn't sit through Traviata to find out how it ends; one can put up with the appreciative tear from the school director at the end. "It was avant-garde".

Where does dance go after hip-hop. That was my interest going into the movie. This is perhaps the digestive phase: the big production number at the end happens in the rain and not the polite little rain of Dancing in the Rain : it is night and pouring, the dancers plunge to do their figures, they lift themselves dripping water like the spirits of drowning men. They are a crew, a gang: West Side Story precision and group mouvement. The moves they do mix dance traditions, lyrical and athletic yet one never leaves musical theater: the dancers are characters in a story, with realtionships and lines.

Those of us who do a lot of homework know things: slavery for France ended in 1848, at the time of the Paris Commune, France's second revolution. Yet the bro thing is ever-present in this movie. It includes the heroine, a white orphan, which is perhaps an opening. Commercial reviewers on the Net have castigated this movie for being innocent on issues of race and class. I beg to differ. The uneducated black leader gets wiped off the mat. He looses, big time. And the nerdy little white kid, Something or other the Third, ends up being a great dancer after all. Nonsence. He is a skinny runt: great dancers are athletes.

Our household is going to own this movie, when it finally comes out on dvd. I already know some of the moves myself.