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COPYRIGHT 2008 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Watching some of the popular dance movie musicals of recent decades--including "Flashdance," "Footloose," "The Cotton Club," "Strictly Ballroom," and "Chicago"--I've been astonished that audiences could endure and even applaud the bizarre way in which they were shot. Again and again, directors like Adrian Lyne ("Flashdance") and Rob Marshall ("Chicago") broke dance movement into fragmentary closeups--furiously tapping feet or thrusting elbows or churning thighs. Dance is devoted to the splendor of the body, but these movies turned bodies into pistons, pumps, cylinders--at times, we might have been watching a Soviet documentary on milk production. The shots yielded repetitive movement for film editors, who, with the directors sitting over their shoulders, rechoreographed the dance into rhythmically stimulating but humanly nonsensical patterns. The impulse to fragment movement came from music videos, I suppose, but videos have a practical purpose--they have to sell music as mood and product--and a dance musical is, or should be, a dramatic form, a special way of expressing emotions too powerful for words.
Thirty years ago, the director John Badham created a sensation by putting John Travolta front and center on a dance floor in "Saturday Night Fever," a movie that crystallized disco madness before the public got bored with it. Last year's "Stomp the Yard" tried to do the same not for a new dance craze but for step dancing, or stepping, a craze...
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