Onstage, she leaped. Her tutu flew up, spread out and soared along with her body as she pointed her toes, a grin on her face.
Was it a beautiful ballet move that no doubt took her hours to perfect? Definitely. But was it anything we hadn’t seen before? Not exactly.
First Position, a ballet documentary, follows six dancers training for the Youth America Grand Prix, the Olympics of ballet competitions. Instead of medals, the competition hands out scholarship money and ballet company memberships as prizes.
It’s a diverse group – a 16-year-old from Colombia living alone in New York; an orphan whose birth parents were killed by rebels in Sierra Leone when she was a baby; the child of a military family living overseas who has to commute two hours to dance school.
The camera follows each of them as they sweat, pirouette and sustain injuries through long days of beating up their bodies in order to live their dream of dancing.
Ah, how romantic and inspirational! Dancers doing what they love, no matter the cost! That’s the epitome of the American Dream!
I feel sick.
In covering the behind-the-scenes aspect of the competition, First Position takes the issue of success in the art world and, as if it’s some kind of ice cream sundae, drenches it in sappy, sugary chocolate syrup.
The film misrepresents the genre by focusing on six dancers who get lucky. Dance – or any art, for that matter – is about more than just the success stories. There’s no shortage of other things they could cover, starting with the underdogs who don’t make it. As much as we love to see everything end with a “happily ever after,” that tagline gets boring after so many sagas with feel-good conclusions.
On the bright side, the camera perfectly captures all the beautiful dance moves so that even if the plot makes you want to throw up, at least you can mute the volume and watch the pretty ballerinas.
VERDICT: First Position echoes the same-old “I’ll do anything to dance!” mantra, becoming just another cliche documentary on the rack of uninteresting dance flicks.
raghavendran@umdbk.com
