Mad Hot Ballroom

Mad Hot Ballroom documents the results of a free ballroom dance programme set up in inner city elementary schools in New York, focusing on three groups and their quest to win the Colours of the Rainbow ballroom dance competition.

The obvious comparison is Spellbound, the 2002 documentary about American spelling bees. But where Spellbound displayed children and their high-powered stage parents as freakish over-achievers, Mad Hot Ballroom is a far more tender effort. Possibly, this is because we are made aware very early on, through interviews with school principals and teachers, that this programme has been set up specifically in poor school districts, some of which have a 90% poverty rate.

As with other documentaries that involve children, the kids are all wonderfully frank. Emma, from the Tribeca school, is particularly keen to voice her precocious opinions on the biological superiority of girls, while her classmate Cyrus often quietly demands explanations for things that he (rightly) suspects are more complex. Wilson, a Dominican boy from the Washington Heights school, is new to the US and speaks little English, a fact that is more than compensated for by his bilingual teacher Yomaira and the fact that he dances the rumba as if he has been taught from birth. The way he holds his partner Elsamelys, his hand carefully placed just underneath her shoulder, as if lifting her slightly, is the kind of hold normally seen only in professional adult dancers. The way he looks at her also has an effect, as she puts it to her girlfriends on the dance team: "He's a very special person." Dancing with Wilson, Elsamelys assumes the haughty posture of a tango diva, hinting at the kind of woman she may grow up to be.

It is refreshing to see that despite the cultural paranoia surrounding paedophilia, as well as the sexualisation and consumerisation of children, teachers like Yomaira continue to do well. She takes the girls in her dance group shopping for coordinating outfits for the competition, finally selecting a knee length skirt with an angled hem the girls are all very taken with, despite the fact that Yomaira insists their tops will cover their navels. Just before the final competition, she embraces each child, assuring them all that she loves them. Her overwhelming excitement at their skill and success is clearly sincere, and displays the kind of devotion one rarely sees expressed in teaching. There are certainly different types of teachers, but not everyone makes a difference in the lives of their students in the way that Yomaira clearly has with her dance group. She voices her acceptance of the fact that, of course, not all students go on to achieve the kind of life you would want for them, but she remains optimistic.

While the subject matter is fascinating and one cannot help but be cut up in the children's successes and failures, Mad Hot Ballroom lacks structure. There are sequences where additional narration would have contributed to the overall cohesion of the film, and sometimes it is unclear as to which adults are the schoolteachers and which are the dance teachers. In some ways it almost feels like a much longer documentary designed for television that has been edited down for the cinema. Certainly, there is enough material here for a fascinating documentary series.

Aside from that, this is ideal for the dance mad under-12s and their parents, or carers - if the audience with whom I saw the film is anything to go by. Many of the tiny ballerinas, aspiring Fosse-esque triple threat performers and their moms sat rapt and silent at the ballroom stylings of kids from Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx. Soon, in addition to jazz, ballet and tap, children may be begging for swing, jive, foxtrot and rumba lessons.