Dance scenes in movies can be tricky, but magical
La La Land opens with a bang, or should we say a burst - of leaps and pirouettes, not to mention bicycles sashaying along the roofs of automobiles. It’s not easy to stage a successful dance scene for the cameras - especially on a highway interchange but when such a scene works, it can be memorable.
One secret, says La La Land choreographer Mandy Moore, is not to compete with the camera, but in a sense, to find a way to dance with it. “When it’s done right, it’s this perfect marriage of how the camera is moving in conjunction and collaboration with the movement of the dancer,” she says.
Dancing on a stage is three-dimensional; on a screen, you lose an entire dimension. But you can use the camera to convey emotion in ways you can’t onstage. “You can see how dance changes the person – that’s a key,” says Wendy Perron, former editor in chief of Dance Magazine and author of Through the Eyes of a Dancer.
Because everyone has their favourite dance moments in movies, and because, hey, it’s just fun to remember this stuff, here are a few scenes where the cameras helped create dance magic:
Yep, it was heaven
I’m in heaven, Fred Astaire sings to Ginger Rogers, warbling Irving Berlin’s Cheek to Cheek in the 1935 film Top Hat. And so are we. “Fred is so cool and she’s so coy,” Moore notes, adding that the scene is so successful because it tells a story through movement. “They’re almost a little icy the way they start, and then just this beautiful way that they open up through the performance, and they’re just so free and gorgeous through dancing together,” she says. Check out those swoon-worthy twirling lifts toward the end.
Log-spinning and armwrestling
There’s some real gymnastics in the rip-roaring choreography by Michael Kidd in the 1954 film, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The big dance in the barn - with guys competing for the gals - is a showstopper. Moore loves that this dance story is told without lyrics.
“These days, we’re so used to being spoon-fed what we’re supposed to feel,” she says. Check out that guy on the spinning log, not to mention what can best be described as a balance beam routine that includes arm-wrestling.
Dancin’ in the rain
‘Of course, Kelly’s raindrenched virtuoso performance in the title song of Singin’ in the Rain (1952) is a wonder - especially when you consider that, according to movie lore, he had a bad cold and fever. Then there are Donald O’Connor’s athletics - including wall-climbing somersaults - in Make Em Laugh.
But let’s consider the recently departed Debbie Reynolds, who at age 19 had no dance training, and somehow held her own, expertly tapping away with Kelly and O’Connor in the joyous Good Morning - which she has said made her feet bleed.
Mambo in the gym
There’s no debating the brilliance of Jerome Robbins’ choreography for West Side Story (1961). But which dance scene gets top billing? For Moore, it’s that opening with the Jets and Sharks and those snapping fingers. “You just do that snap and a little jump and everybody instantly knows it’s West Side Story,” she says.
For Perron, it’s the Mambo dance at the gym, where Maria (Natalie Wood) and Tony (Richard Beymer) fall in love. Especially that cinematic moment “when all the others blur out, and Tony and Maria come into focus, and it’s just an amazing fallingin-love moment. The music slows down, and there's an inevitability about their coming together and ignoring the whole world."