Educational Media Reviews Online

PS Dance! shows five different dance programs within New York City’s public school system. The film is a long form video hosted by newscaster Paula Zahn promoting the dance education program in New York City’s public schools. Unfortunately, the video’s promotional nature may be problematic for libraries seeking dance films that do something else.

One of the things that this video does well is to illustrate the diversity within the dance program. Children in the early grades learn not only to move with their bodies, but how to use words to describe movement; middle school students create a dance piece around the theme of bullying; and high school students chant anatomy in a kinesthetic manner akin to the “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” song.

The profiles of the dedicated dance teachers in PS Dance! are another strength of the video. The diversity within the dance program is a credit to each of the programs’ teachers. While the teachers’ training ranges from Laban Movement Analysis to African dance, each teacher is engaged with the process of educating their students. The most moving evidence of the teachers’ passion for dance is in the dances they perform for each other as part of a professional development workshop for all of the school system’s dance educators.

The flaws of PS Dance! are a product of its promotional nature. The film is funded by The Arnhold Foundation with copyright held by the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE). Given that these supporters have created a promotional video rather than a documentary, the lack of background history on arts education in New York City, hard numbers on the impact of this program and U.S. education at large, and information about how the program and its teachers are funded, let alone any lessons learned along the way by NYCDOE, are expected. The promotional style of the video is also why newscaster Zahn introduces each of the segments in PS Dance! Zahn also narrates a segment on the Blueprints For Teaching and Learning in the Arts, which are the standards for dance and other arts programs in the New York City school system. This reinforces the video’s promo-news-educational video style. While the filmmakers’ stylistic decisions make sense within the format of the video, I question why the DVD packaging calls this a “new documentary that captures what happens…”

I have reviewed many dance films released over the past few years. I consider myself fortunate for this opportunity, and am grateful for it. I worry, though, because most of the dance films I review are, to refer to a recent New York Times review on a recent television program, mostly in the style of public service announcements (Hale, 2015). I also worry that filmmakers are not creating other styles of films related to dance, or not submitting them to be reviewed in EMRO; I worry that there is a fear that distributing and creating critical and challenging films about this most ephemeral art will diminish the funding for dance. When the U.S. government’s federal agency that “funds, promotes, and strengthens the creative capacity of our communities by providing all Americans with diverse opportunities for arts participation” has a 2015 appropriation of $146,021,000 that was once $149,585,000 in 1979, it is a reality that the arts is funded as a niche, dance is a niche of this niche, and that the audience for documentaries consuming dance is also a niche (National Endowment for the Arts, n.d.)

I hope that my fears are unfounded. And I also hope that more distributors will bring dance films and films with dance to light.

If PS Dance! incorporated more depth, I would recommend it without reservations. Instead, I recommend PS Dance! with reservations, yet hope that college and university libraries serving dance programs with an education emphasis might enjoy this video as I did.

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Hale, M. (2015, November 15). Review: “The Latin Explosion: A New America,” on HBO, Is a Music Civics Lesson. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/arts/television/review-the-latin-explosion-a-new-america-on-hbo-is-a-music-civics-lesson.html

National Endowment for the Arts. (n.d.). National Endowment for the Arts Appropriations History. Retrieved November 23, 2015, from https://www.arts.gov/open-government/national-endowment-arts-appropriations-history