Factory Outlet: Dance as Blue-Collar Solace

Feature films that set the body-centered priorities of dance against an unyielding industrial landscape are nothing new: “Flashdance” exploited that playoff 15 years ago. But in this month alone, three very different films in what we can call the factory-dance genre have reached American screens, each of them depicting characters who find the act of performance an escape, if only in fantasy, from an intolerably harsh environment.

As in the hugely successful “The Full Monty,” the presence of a grimly realistic working-class milieu is central to the childhood ballet fable “Billy Elliot” (from England), the tap musical “Bootmen” (from Australia) and the operatic melodrama “Dancer in the Dark” (set in America but with a perspective distinctive to its Swedish/Icelandic creative team).

Labor troubles in the first film, imminent layoffs in the second and a punishing, even dangerous, work schedule in the third create a devastating impact on the central family relationships of each story. With factory life as the only alternative for three sets of trapped characters, dance becomes an essential expression of the human spirit in the face of the industrial world’s most oppressive and dehumanizing urban blight.

For 11-year-old Billy Elliot, however, a bitter strike at the local coal mine matters less than the problem of making everyone believe he’s going to boxing lessons instead of ballet classes. But his emotionally burned-out father and rebellious brother balance the upbeat whimsy of Billy’s story with the hard facts of the strikers’ struggle to survive.

Coincidentally, “Bootmen” also features a numb widower losing control of his two sons: one of them (like Billy’s brother) on the wrong side of the law and the other (like Billy) an emerging dancer, though in this case a young adult named Sean. Here, too, the bottom-line reality of a factory town (in this case, one dominated by a steel mill) conditions the men’s lives.

It also conditions “Dancer in the Dark.” Here, a Czech immigrant named Selma is nearly blind but intent on keeping her job at the local tool-and-die factory in order to save enough money for her 10-year-old son’s operation. Her devoted friend, Kathy, functions as a sibling in her story, taking her to movie musicals and describing the action on-screen.

In turn, Selma invents fantasy musicals of her own in moments of crisis--turning the facts of an increasingly hopeless existence into Hollywood-style song and dance a la the British TV series “Pennies From Heaven” and the American feature film based on it.

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As in “Pennies From Heaven,” Fred Astaire serves as a touchstone in each of these films--mentioned as a key to Selma’s character in “Dancer in the Dark,” corrupted by a dancer imitating his style in “Bootmen,” and glimpsed in top hat, white tie and tails in “Billy Elliot” to help define Billy’s initial image of dancing.

You can also find glints of Astaire in the perfectly dreadful yet sweetly endearing audition routine that Billy performs at key junctures in his story--a routine that represents just about all the formal dancing that choreographer Peter Darling supplies in the film. For even though Billy grows up to be the charismatic Adam Cooper of the Matthew Bourne “Swan Lake,” the tight narrative focus avoids conventional performance diversions, however satisfying, in order to depict dancing as personally transformative: physical discipline leading to hard-won self-realization.

It is this sense of self-realization that makes dance such a powerful counterforce to the industrial status quo in each film--a life-affirming process that becomes far more decisive as a plot element than any actions by the nominal love interests assigned Billy, Sean and Selma. Young Billy, in particular, lights up whenever he dances, and the film’s field of view widens at these moments to encompass his expanded perspective.

However, when dance eventually invades or impacts the mine/mill/factory world of these films, disaster looms in the workplace (sometimes only temporarily). Selma loses her job after a lapse of attention during a dance-fantasy causes a costly accident. Sean screws up on television, causing his father to suffer his colleagues’ ridicule at the mill, and Billy’s dad nearly turns scab to pay for his son’s ballet lessons.

Indeed, you might conclude that each of these films depicts dance as a kind of underground religion (though “Dancer in the Dark” is no less reverential about song), because looking into the gleaming eyes of their protagonists, you’re watching something much closer to classic film treatments of the uncomprehending, fatally disruptive Joan of Arc or Bernadette of Lourdes than the sweaty, sexy, worldly leads in “Flashdance,” “Dirty Dancing” or “Saturday Night Fever.”

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As the most conventionally sweaty, sexy and worldly of the three new releases, “Bootmen” adopts many of the most familiar ploys of the show business musical for an unusual purpose. Though not a film version of “Tap Dogs,” it aims to develop a kind of mythic backstory for the 1995 Aussie industrial-dance stage hit, created by the film’s producer/director/choreographer, Dein Perry. Audiences familiar with “Tap Dogs” will not only recognize the heavy-footed, proletarian tap style that Sean supposedly invents but some of the show’s dancers and choreographic ideas--though Perry has expanded them way beyond the scope of any touring production.

So where the men of “Tap Dogs” briefly clomped and sloshed in a shallow tray of water, their counterparts in “Bootmen” splash in and around a wide-wide pool in the kaleidoscopic let’s-put-on-a-show finale that fans of Mickey and Judy, Fred and Ginger--and even Groucho, Harpo and Chico--will know is going to resolve every plot point.

In “Dancer in the Dark,” however, movie musicals function as a kind of opiate for poor Selma, and choreographer Vincent Paterson has avoided the diversionary camp spectacle that he brought to the fantasy-escape sequences in the Broadway musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

Instead he adopts a weightier, character-based style closer to Bourne in “Swan Lake” and, especially, “Cinderella.” Highlights include a factory number that builds upon machine rhythms in the manner of Astaire’s “Slap That Bass” solo in “Shall We Dance” (though at much larger scale), and a sequence involving a train on a bridge that inventively combines the movement of the camera, the leading characters and the corps dancers aboard a moving train.

Unfortunately, the dance numbers are ruinously edited--reduced to incoherent fragments or movement riffs, as if Selma has been watching MTV instead of vintage movie musicals. Strangely, however, the extended, purely vocal numbers in the film remain unmolested (the aftermath of an accidental killing, for instance, and Selma’s final aria). Here we find long, unbroken takes emphasizing shot-to-shot continuity--exactly what goes out the window when the dancing starts.

Obviously, the main attraction of “Dancer in the Dark” is singer/composer Bjork, who plays Selma. So Paterson must find ways of making her central to his dances without exposing her limitations. And, even more obviously, the limitations of a beginning, 11-year-old ballet student need not be overtaxed (along with the viewer’s patience) in “Billy Elliot” by putting him into world-class choreographies. That leaves only “Bootmen,” depicting newly hatched professionals in the full cry of youthful prowess, to provide the standard expectations of a dance film.

But careerism is arguably a paltry reason to dance--or to fuel a film about dancing--and this summer’s made-in-America feature, “Center Stage” (about students in a ballet workshop that ultimately becomes a contest), put plenty of aggressive virtuosity on the screen without making any of it matter. Even “Bootmen” finds more to dance about than that.

Just like “Billy Elliot” and “Dancer in the Dark,” it dances about the links between family members; about living life in every muscle at every moment; most of all about making the cruelly confined, deafening, smoky industrial wasteland into a context for art.