Taglines: Life doesn’t hold tryouts.
Center Stage movie storyline. In this emotional drama, a team of young dancers are competing for places in a prestigious dance troupe. The dancers have to deal with the ups and downs of trying to find their place in the world, even as their profession also places an enormous physical and psychological challenge before them.
They train with the rigor of championship athletes, and like most aspiring athletes, they know that only a tiny number of them will achieve the goal they’ve set for themselves. Director Nicholas Hytner) cast young dancers and athletes as his aspiring terpsichoreans, including Ilia Kulik, an Olympic gold medalist in figure skating; the cast also includes Peter Gallagher as the leader of the dance troupe, Susan May Pratt, Amanda Schull, Eion Bailey, Debra Monk, and Sascha Radetsky.
Center Stage is a 2000 American teen drama film directed by Nicholas Hytner about a group of young dancers from various backgrounds who enroll at the fictitious American Ballet Academy in New York City. The film explores the issues and difficulties in the world of professional dance, and how each individual copes with the stresses. The film opened at #6 at the box office making $4,604,621 USD in its opening weekend. The film has grossed a total of $26,385,941 worldwide.
Film Review for Center Stage
Alan Parker’s ”Fame” is a movie that will live forever in the memories of anyone who was a stage-struck adolescent — or the parent of one — in the waning days of the Carter administration. But it has been 20 years, almost to the day, since that swirling, high-kicking soap opera about students at New York’s High School for the Performing Arts was released, and today’s aspiring troupers surely deserve a movie of their own about young artists coming of age and learning how to fly.
Nicholas Hytner’s ”Center Stage” will do, but just. It is narrower in scope than its predecessor, which followed a multicultural cohort of actors, dancers and singers through sexual identity crises and professional growing pains. This film tracks a small group of students at the fictitious American Ballet Academy — which is somewhere near the real Lincoln Center — through a stressful year of Prussian discipline, cut-throat competition and sexual intrigue.
Not too sexual, though, or too intriguing. The plot of ”Center Stage” is a harlequin print of romantic triangles involving dancers, choreographers and the academy’s fearsome artistic director, played with feline cool by Peter Gallagher. He has stolen a prima ballerina away from his protege, a brilliant, impetuous dancer named Cooper Nielsen (Ethan Stiefel), who in turn steals Jody, an insecure dancer in training (Amanda Schull), away from one of her classmates (Sascha Radetsky).
All of this will be recapitulated, ”American in Paris”-style, in Cooper’s show-stopping ballet at the movie’s end. Meanwhile, Jody must struggle with bad feet and a body somewhat curvier than the ostrich-neck balletic ideal in her quest to make the end-of-the-year cut. And Maureen (Susan May Pratt), the most ruthlessly competitive and prodigiously talented student at the academy, will have to choose between normal life, represented by her sweet Columbia pre-med boyfriend (Eion Bailey), and art, embodied by her pushy, uptight harridan of a stage mother (Debra Monk).
These are not subtle characterizations. Maureen is bulimic, a counterweight (so to speak) for another character who guiltlessly gobbles down fruit tarts and is dismissed from the school for the fleshiness that results. Rounding out the cast are Zoe Saldana as Eva Rodriquez, whose bad attitude is signaled by the fact that she swears, chews gum in the salle, and often shows up late to class, and Shakiem Evans as Erik, apparently the only gay male dancer in Manhattan. But you know that Eva’s passionate commitment to her art will triumph just as surely as you know that her stern, impatient teacher (Donna Murphy) will turn out to have a heart of gold, and that any romance Erik finds will take place safely off screen.
The script, by Carol Heikkinen, has a lot of business to take care of before the Big Show, which is its mandatory climax, and it steamrolls through its expository scenes with more efficiency than grace, as though in a desperate hurry to reach the next commercial break. But who ever went to a dance movie to see good writing? Or, for that matter, important acting? However shabbily it treats her sister muses, ”Center Stage” at least honors Terpsichore, whose devotees can practice their leg extensions during the dramatic bits.
The cast includes just enough real actors to make these bits bearable, and even occasionally touching. But its three most important parts have been given to dancers. Mr. Steifel is a principal dancer for the American Ballet Theater, where Mr. Radetsky also dances, and Ms. Schull is a member of the San Francisco Ballet. Can they act? What a stupid question. They can read, which suffices.
In films like ”The Madness of King George” and ”The Crucible,” adapted from plays, Mr. Hytner has shown a rare knack for opening up stage-bound material, and he may have been drawn to this project by the technical challenge of capturing the pure, thrilling physicality of dance in the disembodied medium of film. Dance tends to be recorded either somnolently, by stationary cameras meant to replicate the perspective of a live audience, or frantically, by cutting and panning that often deliberately blurs what the dancers are actually doing. In the long dance sequences at the end of ”Center Stage,” Mr. Hytner’s camera follows the performers without stepping on their toes, to marvelous effect.
Mr. Hytner was helped by two talented, omnivorous choreographers, Susan Stroman and Christopher Wheeldon, whose discipline and ebullience save some of the movie’s ill-conceived big numbers — at a salsa club and a downtown jazz studio — from triteness and vulgarity. Cooper’s climactic dance, Ms. Stroman’s work, at first looks like a horrifying compilation of ”Dirty Dancing” pelvic action and the kind of knee sliding and arm-waving that was mercifully quashed at this year’s Oscars, but it ends up being, like this movie, sexy and infectious in spite of itself.
Center Stage (2000)
Directed by: Nicholas Hytner
Starring: Amanda Schull, Zoe Saldana, Susan May Pratt, Peter Gallagher, Donna Murphy, Ethan Stiefel, Christine Dunham, Barbara Caruso, Victor Anthony, Karen Shallo
Screenplay by: Carol Heikkinen
Production Design by: David Gropman
Cinematography by: Geoffrey Simpson
Film Editing by: Tariq Anwar
Costume Design by: Ruth Myers
Set Decoration by: Susan Bode
Art Direction by: Peter Rogness
Music by: George Fenton
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language and some sensuality.
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: May 12, 2000
Views: 90
