Ali leaves behind a troubled life and follows her dreams to Los Angeles, where she lands a job as a cocktail waitress at the Burlesque Lounge, a once-majestic theater that houses an inspired musical revue. Vowing to perform there, she makes the leap from bar to stage, helping restore the club's former glory.
Assaulted by Third World outlaws, donkey-riding Rosie joins a silent drifter's search for gold.
Evan Evans, the director of a ballet troupe, is rehearsing his next show in Monaco, in preparation for a worldwide tour. When one member of his troupe leaves to get married, Evans imposes a regime of strict discipline on his remaining dancers. The latter get their revenge by presenting Evans’ nephew Philippe, the only male member of the group, with a baby and a note claiming he is the father…
Two young strangers meet in Naples and begin to flirt and dance in the street.
A humble Romanian actor in his 40's, hardly surviving between a complicated part in a musical, a depressed wife, and the obsession of an imminent, devastating earthquake, becomes the victim of his manipulative father.
Bill Moyers and filmmaker David Grubin give viewers a rare glimpse into dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones’s highly acclaimed dance Still/Here. At workshops around the country, people facing life-threatening illnesses are asked to remember the highs and lows of their lives, and even imagine their own deaths. They then transform their feelings into expressive movement, which Jones incorporates into the dance performed later in the program. For this documentary, Jones demonstrates the movements of his own life story: his first encounter with white people, confusion over his sexuality, his partner Arnie Zane’s untimely death from AIDS, and Jones’s own HIV-positive status.
The lives of two local professional dancers change suddenly as American soldiers stop in their town hoping to be entertained in accordance with the Broadway style. Effectively, they perform up to their expectations. However, as the army men have to march northward, their moment of glory finishes heartlessly.
A synthesis of sound and movement; colourful characters dance and move in repetitive patterns to percussive and melodic elements. A combination of motion and music that is hypnotic and beautiful. At first it feels structured and orderly but as more elements are added becomes quixotically expressive.
Two lazy friends (Mimis Fotopoulos and Ntinos Iliopoulos) find a job as ice-cream vendors to pay their back rent. When they start giving ice-cream to poor children for free, their boss, incensed, chases them off, and they take refuge in a nightclub, where they disguise themselves as female dancers. One misunderstanding follows another, until the impresario seeks them out, offering them a job as a comedy routine.
Soon after the VE Day celebrations, there is a second chance to let the hair down, and these dancers make the most of it with much humour.
Gangster Jim Boyd serves a 15-year prison term when Hardy, a rival crook, doublecrosses him. On his release from prison, Boyd seeks out Hardy in Chicago, where he runs a cafe and bootleg operation. He makes the acquaintance of Mona Gale, a dancer in Hardy's cafe who is engaged to marry Jack Waring, the orchestra leader. Unaware that Mona is his daughter, Boyd shoots Hardy in a brawl and leaves behind evidence implicating Waring as the murderer. After Hardy's death, Mona joins Boyd's gang to gather evidence proving her fiancé's innocence. The gang members discover that Mona has dealings with the police, and they begin to torture her. Having learned of Mona's relationship to him at the last minute, Boyd arrives at the gang's hideout in time to save her. He confesses to killing Hardy before he dies from a wound inflicted by one of his own gang, thus freeing Waring to marry Mona.
In this Pete Smith Specialties short, two professional dancers beautifully demonstrate the rumba and conga while actors humorously display some incorrect techniques for those dances.
Bertolt Brecht asked whether there would be singing in the dark times. In the throes of war, the United Ukrainian Ballet Company defiantly insists there will be dancing, too. Far from the land they call home, young dancers take quiet comfort from art. For a while, their work feels like the old days, except there is a new troupe member: a soldier learning to dance with prosthetic legs.
Hear the Lama band, see the sacred dances: welcome to Sikkim, in the shadow of the Himalayas.
This ultra-kitsch documentary goes behind the scenes at Murray's Cabaret Club, where Christine Keeler was later a showgirl.
Check Your Body At The Door is a documentary film about some remarkable underground house dancers in NYC during the golden decade of the 1990s. It follows master free-stylists into the clubs, their jobs, and their everyday lives. Filmed in the studio as well, the dancers’ virtuosic moves are brilliantly revealed in silhouette or light pools. In their words they describe the importance of clubbing, why they dance, how they dance, and what it means.
Stories about young Ukrainian dancers and their hasty flight to the Netherlands. You see their new life as refugees. The former conservatory in The Hague is a shelter for them where they collect their lives and find refuge in their profession: dance. The formation of a new ballet company, The United Ukrainian Ballet, is an important foothold in winning back their lives. They find comfort in each other and close friendships develop. In addition, there is the great love for ballet, for the dancers the best way to express themselves.
The motions and gestures of military riot police, slowed down while performed by dancers, are surprisingly beautiful. Menace and violence estranged from context and time looks eerily strange, and all too familiar. In this gallery piece, Isaac Chong Wai somehow anticipates, a year early, key images of the Hong Kong protests.
The story unfolds in an alternate reality. Chee-Ke works for the "dance police". By the will of fate, he has to quit. For three years there is no news about the hero. But suddenly the singer Kunnei is kidnapped by the villain Bachata, and Chee-Ke is forced to go on the warpath. The policeman and his assistant must defeat the kidnappers in dance battles.
Follow the lives of popular dancers at the World Famous Playground Dance Studio, in Los Angeles.
