Watching their steps

It was a most unusual screening, held just at the height of the two-week Tribeca Film Festival. The signs on the roped-off good seats up front had names like “P.S. 115, Washington Heights” and “P.S. 144, Queens” -- and those seats were filled up by those schools’ preteen students. It was outdoors, in a plaza on the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan, and the far-off Statue of Liberty was obscured from most angles by a monster projection screen. To the viewer’s right of the screen, giant boats bobbled in a cove, one a double-story cruiser, the other a long, narrow yacht. The thick-waisted buildings of the World Financial Center and Battery Park City blocked in the cove on the other side, and up the river lines of planes ran in, lighted up in the spring twilight. At 7:46 p.m., it was almost dark enough for showtime.

The film everyone was waiting for was “Mad Hot Ballroom,” which documents a competitive ballroom dance program in New York City’s public schools. It will be released Friday in New York City. Then, on May 20, it’ll roll out in Los Angeles and nine other cities, including San Francisco and Washington, D.C. It was made by two pals turned collaborators, Marilyn Agrelo and Amy Sewell -- Agrelo directed and Sewell produced, working from a story she’d written on the program for a small Manhattan newspaper. Neither had done her own film before.

ON-THE-SPOT DEMONSTRATION

One could learn plenty here about dance even before the film began. “Are you ready to shake what your momma gave you?” asked a tall man on a stage in front of the screen. “We’re going to start with some merengue!”

His helpers, introduced as Miss Annie and Mr. Rodney, illustrated the dance steps; Mr. Rodney was wearing a snazzy blazer-pants mismatch. “Yes,” he narrated, “then the lady goes under.” A handful of kids, girls with boys or other girls, most of them seemingly between 9 and 11, most of them black or Latino did, in fact, dance the merengue between the long row of seats and the stage. The dance leader exhorted, “Get your chicken wings up, men!”

A sly gum-chewing boy ditched the pretty girl he’d danced with for an even prettier girl in a white jean jacket. For the 3,000 or so people in the square, it suddenly got cold -- unless they were dancing, and by 8 p.m., the crowd of gyrating children had grown to 75 or so. A delivery man rode his bike straight through the crowd, his bell jingling; someone’s dinner dangled from his handlebars. The film started, and a jogger in shorts and a thin T-shirt slowed, stopped and stayed, despite the plunging temperature.

“Mad Hot Ballroom” is straightforward and deceptively simple. It takes up its story in February 2004, when the ballroom dance lessons begin in participating elementary schools, and follows a number of classes through basic training, selection for a citywide competition, and to the final fight for the outrageously large trophy.

The film is one part “Kids Say the Darndest Things,” one part the “No, your arms rest on her there” of “Shall We Dance” and maybe just a hint of the streetwise blustering of “Bring It On.”

But there are also a few lovely subtleties to the film: There is no narration whatsoever, such a welcome relief from these voice-over-obsessed times. More impressively, the basic premise required that the moviemakers insinuate themselves inside the sticky bureaucracy of the infamously protective New York public school system -- and not only into the classrooms but also into the students’ homes.

WINNING THE PARTIES’ TRUST

A few days later, the flowering trees had begun tossing off their first petals in the spring wind and, safely inside in a sensible suit, Agrelo, the film’s director, was tucked at a table in the mad lobby of the Tribeca Grand Hotel. While the Tribeca Film Festival, which produced the film’s outdoor screening, doesn’t exactly transform lower Manhattan into Park City, there are film circuit givens: sleep deprivation, publicists in overdrive, movie people chatting in midscreening about what films one must see -- or must not be seen at.

Another oddity of the outdoor screening the other night: sitting with the exuberant kids while principals and teachers on-screen discuss their sociological disadvantages. “The children come to school with issues,” said a principal. One kid was “very close to being a street thug,” said another adult. It felt a little like watching a patient peek at the psychiatrist’s notes.

“I know, I felt the same,” said Agrelo. “And ever since we put that into the film, because it’s important to have that information in the film -- but I’ve always projected ahead: They’re gonna hear this one day.” She has the patient demeanor of a bank manager; it’s easy to see how she and Sewell charmed kids and administrators alike. “Everything is made more delicate because they’re so young. I don’t know frankly how I would have taken being shown in a public venue like this, being so young. But I think everyone’s pretty happy.”

This is Agrelo’s first outing as director, though she’s been around the industry long enough to know that the movie’s progress has been charmed: a five-month shoot, with the film completed just four months after that, and bought three months later, last January, after it premiered on the first night of Slamdance.

She laughed off the challenges along the way: “The board of education, their main concern is, are they going to be sued? Are any kids going to be injured? Are you going to disrupt their school day? They just don’t want to have problems with the parents,” and she noted that a crew of four women with a mini-DV camera and no lights was “not very threatening.”

The Agrelo-Sewell team will soon take up a project begun by Agrelo years ago, a documentary about the not-quite-parallel tracks of her family here and in Cuba.

But mostly, Agrelo’s unconcerned with showbiz and openings; she’s kid-besotted and, in keeping with the Tribeca fest’s main theme, rah-rah on New York. “Most people, when they think of New York City public schools, they think of metal detectors. They’re great little kids and this is a nice city and -- oh, I could go on and on.”