Gotta Dance, Gotta Dance! Season, BFI

This July, the BFI's Gotta Dance, Gotta Dance! Season will celebrate dance films across the ages: an exuberant slice of razzle-dazzle entertainment sure to make us bop in our seats. Here’s our pick of the toe-tapping highlights.

Singing in the Rain

Old favorites deserve to be enjoyed again and again, and Singing In the Rain is so central to so many people's earliest movie memories, no wonder the BFI named it's Season after star Gene Kelly's breath-taking number 'Gotta Dance!'. With the help of gorgeously sunny Debbie Reynolds, iconic sequences like 'Make 'Em Laugh' and a welcome bite of movie-industry satire, Singing in the Rain is a true classic.

Busby Berkeley's choreography

The season looks back to the 1933 musical Footlight Parade, which showcases the ingenious choreography of Busby Berkeley. His pioneering, trademark conceit was to award the audience a birds-eye view of his unfathomably complex dance sequences- both on land and in water. We can only gawp at the intercut close-ups of the performers' relaxed, smiling faces- as if their kaleidoscopic formations are no big deal. 

Ballet tragedy

Less cheerful is cinema's most famous Ballet outing, 1942's The Red Shoes. It's an intense adaptation of the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale by Bafta-winning British film-makers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, known collectively as The Archers.  Though the world of The Red Shoes is theatrical, it boasts exquisite cinematography that grasps the transition in medium firmly by the ankles...and doesn't let go. 

For something completely different...

And then then there's Baz Luhrmann's 1992 film Strictly Ballroom, which should be paid royalties for the conga line of popcorn-fare that uses a dance competition to dramatize young romance. Strictly Ballroom did it first, and better, with a comedic flare and energy that made it one of the most successful Australian films of all time. 

Billy Elliot

From sequins to the 1980's minors' strike in Northern England where dance as the ultimate form of self expression is whole-heartedly offered in Stephen Daldry's much-loved Billy Elliot. Next to the expertise of Kelly and Berkeley, it's certainly the entry that cares the least for flawless delivery. Indeed the subtle performances (particularly Gary Lewis as Billy's mourning father) are as naturalistic as a (near) musical could be.  But this verisimilitude is vibrantly soundtracked by T-Rex, and the dance numbers punctuate and support the narrative in the same way as ballads and show tunes- no wonder Elton came calling and made it into a West End hit. The wonder of the choreography is that it's artistry hovers mere inches from Billy's natural stamps, fist-clenches and poundings. Here, dance is at its most imperfectly lovely, as a poetic extension of Billy, played with beyond precocious emotional sensitivity by a young Jamie Bell.