Dance Lives Matter


Those of you who have been following the films I have been showing over the past month or so will know that I have been exploring the parallels between the 1930s Busby Berkeley musicals and the modern "Step Up" franchise.

But this has all been part of the larger "umbrella" series of Depression/Comedy that I have been running since the New Year.

As is (hopefully!) clear by now, the Busby Berkeley musicals were not simply "musicals produced during the Depression", they were emphatically products of the Depression.

The Fred & Ginger musicals had aimed for pure escapism. Their stories took place in opulent, Art-Deco re-imaginings of exotic locations around the world...

 …where all the men wore top hat and tails, while all the women wore lavish, improbable gowns (which occasionally caused their dance partners much grief, but that's another story). 

Fred Astaire grumbled about those damn feathers for the next fifty years.

Watching many of those RKO Fred & Ginger films, one could be forgiven for wondering if there even was a Depression. And that was exactly the point: they wanted to give their audiences some relief from all of that suffering.

Everyone lived in hotel suites like this during the Depression. Right?

The Warner Brothers Busby Berkeley musicals took a very different approach. They made no attempt to hide from the Depression; in fact they made the Depression pivotal to the plot in most instances. The characters in these films are usually only one jump ahead of the breadline, and there is no doubt about what might happen to them (and what they might have to do) should they fail in their endeavours.

No one lounges around some Deco version of the Venetian Grand Canal in these films, and no one takes a stroll through the park in top hat, tie and tails. The world of the Busby Berkeley musicals is a world of hard work, sweat and grind (not to mention blackmail, bootlegging and prostitution).

But here is the crucial point: the films are fun.

Yes, they are about life in the Depression. Yes, they depict the brutal life of chorus girls on Broadway, but they don't hit you over the head with social messaging, and they don't send you out of the theatre with the feeling that you've been subjected to 90 minutes of heavy-handed moralizing about the Evils of our modern society and it's all your fault and You Should Feel Really Terrible (not that I'm thinking of Ken Loach or anything).

If there is a secret ingredient to Depression/Comedy, this is it.

These are films about characters who are living in (and struggling against) difficult circumstances, but they do not allow themselves to be defined by those circumstances or those struggles.

At the end of the day (or at the end of the film, which is the same thing) they are saying "Yes, things are awful, but we won't let those things decide who we are. We will stand for something other than the struggle against adversity. We will stand for what we loved, not what we hated."

It is this attitude more than anything else that is evoked so consistently in the Step Up films.


Step Up Revolution (released in Europe as Step Up: Miami Heat, except in France, where it was called Sexy Dance 4... I'm not kidding) is in several ways the strongest film of the series. It is also the one that most explicitly evokes Busby Berkeley.


The story centres around a group of "flash mob" dancers who live and work in Miami, Florida. Most of them have menial day jobs working as service staff in the ultra-luxury resort hotels that line Miami's "South Beach" neighbourhood, while living a few miles away in the impoverished and overcrowded areas that the tourists never see.

When they learn that millionaire real estate tycoon Bill Anderson plans to demolish their homes to make way for another elite high-rise development, they decide to speak up for themselves, Street Dance style.


Remember the "Forgotten Man" number in Gold Diggers of 1933?


Like the other Step Up movies (and the Busby Berkeley films) the plot of Step Up Revolution is paper thin, but the dancing is also off-the-chart spectacular.


Like its Busby Berkeley forebears, there is no plausible explanation as to how these astonishingly elaborate and ambitious dance sequences were mounted by the characters portrayed in the film. And like Busby Berkeley, the dance routines are getting more insane as the films progress.




The makers of the Step Up franchise have studiously avoided the word musical, and in a sense they are correct. But these films are about dancers, and they portray the struggles, the grind and the hardships of those who choose to dance at a time when merely surviving is a challenge. These films are about making a moment in history stand for something other than suffering and oppression.




Sound familiar?

We will screen Step Up Revolution at 7.30 on Thursday, the 25th of July at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

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