Young and Restless.('How She Move' and 'The Witnesses')(Movie review)

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 that forever renews itself. Cultural historians will eventually sort out the origins of step, but the rough consensus is that it originated in Africa, where it may have served as a means for people without a common language to get to know one another. (It is specifically associated with the late-nineteenth-century "gumboot" dancing of mine workers in South Africa.) Step can be seen as an assertive style of talking through the body--stomping with boots, slapping one's chest, thighs, and legs, whirling and spinning. It's not social dancing; it's a way of saying, "This is who I am. This is what I can do." In the early twentieth century, stepping emigrated to America and settled into the fraternities and sororities of black colleges like Morehouse and Spelman, where it picked up elements of military drill. Set in a black college in Atlanta, "Stomp the Yard" featured a good performance by the dancer and actor Columbus Short as a poor kid from Los Angeles who winds up teaching his elite frat brothers how to dance. Short was exciting, but "Stomp the Yard" turned into a slick piece of commercial manufacture that relied on embarrassingly obvious plot turns and the usual supercharged battery of glib camera tricks--slow motion, fast motion, jump cutting, freeze-frame. The director, Sylvain White, who has made music videos, didn't chop up the dancing, but he was too impatient to hold an image for more than a few seconds. A lot of the dance movement got lost in whipped-up "visuals" and in macho posturing so insistent that even in a football movie it would have been hard to take.

The much greater excitement of the new "How She Move"--a rudimentary but thoroughly enjoyable step musical from Canada--is that you can see the dancers from top to bottom, and they all look great. The movie is about step dancing as a high-school obsession--kids defining themselves personally and then as a group in dance, and matching styles in duels with other groups. The heroine, Raya Green (Rutina Wesley), is a smart, ambitious black girl who's been away at an all-white boarding school. After her sister dies of a drug overdose and her parents run out of money, she returns home, somewhat abashed, to the Toronto projects. At her old public school, she's now resented as a snob. She's not snobbish, but she's frankly opportunistic--she wants to get ahead and leave the projects behind--and her mother, a stern Jamaican, won't stop pressuring her to study hard. The plot elements are formulaic, but they're presented plainly and earnestly; the movie is anything but glib.

In the school sequences, the screenwriter, Annmarie Morais, and the director, Ian Iqbal Rashid, produce the same kind of taunting and jostling and romantic troubles seen in American teen movies--though these kids are Canadian, so they seem saner, or, at least, less violent, than Americans. When Raya and her rival Michelle (Tre Armstrong) snarl at each other, the confrontation turns into a step duel--slap, stomp, thrust--and suddenly the movie sheds its teen cliches and takes off. Raya needs money for college, so, against her mother's wishes, she crashes an all-boy step group that's ...