Ballroom dancing? Don't think grannies, or aunts and uncles at family weddings, think teeny-boppers. So discovered Alan Archbold, who had to negotiate the surprisingly teeming, yet non-attention-seeking ballroom dancing subculture for the realisation of his film set in a ballroom, The Rainbow's End. Behind the doors of Parnell Square, and of GAA clubs from Finglas's Erin's Isle to Saint Brigid's on the Navan Road, a nomadic and curiously invisible wonderland, all glitz and glamour, unveiled itself to him. In the absence of PR gurus, or audience development officers to promote ballroom's image, he was in for a few surprises when he received the RTE/Film Board Short Cuts commission last March.
The biggest surprise of all was International Ballroom and Latin champion Stephen McCann, who when not in sixth class at Saint Fiachra's, Artane, leads a jet-setting lifestyle dictated by his cosmopolitan ballroom conquests. Archbold, currently appearing in Fair City, coached McCann for his acting debut in The Rainbow's End. Dubbed by Blue Peter "Britain's top under-12 Ballroom Dancing Couple" with his English partner, he is remarkably unaffected by his success.
"Instead of being very precocious, and finding it troublesome, never once did he get frustrated with having to do what he does, badly, and dancing with a partner who wasn't up to his normal level," says Archbold. "Glorious young actress" Claire McGinn, who was cast beside Stephen despite having little dance experience, was "put through the wringer" for a week-and-a-half of "gruesome, intense tuition". Endearingly, "dancing down" was not a problem for the talented young McCann, whose living room is awash with trophies. Since his first competition at age two, he has simply been following in the fancy footwork steps of his older siblings - "It's never one, it's four or five from the extended family are dancers". It is an astonishing milieu - when 12 year-old Anita Dunne, one of the many junior ballroom dancers in The Rainbow's End, ran up to Archbold out of a sea of dresses and tuxedos at the Republic of Ireland dancing competition in St Brigid's, I couldn't take my eyes off her incongruously fluttering, beaded fake eyelashes.
Perfectly balanced in her high heels, she congratulated him on "the amount of couples that were made on the film" and told of her tears at the completion of the six-day shoot. Looking around, I noticed that all the little girls sported fake eyelashes as others might plaits. Equally, when the little boys hit the dancefloor they transformed into an astonishing cross between John Travolta and Fred Astaire. "You feel odd calling them `kids', explains Archbold. "Even though they are 10, 11, 12. Because of their long exposure to dance in that social environment, they develop social skills much more quickly. They have an air of maturity that a lot of kids their age would not have."
It is the no-man's-land between childhood and adulthood that these ballroom kids inhabit, looking like they are in a complete twilight zone, in that "they are children, but they are adults," that inspired Archbold's story. A father of four himself, he feels this is its most extreme manifestation: "You watch them rehearse and they are 10-year-old kids, but then as soon as they take the stance, and the posture, they are young men and young women." The work ethic espoused by these "very copped-on, and very patient" children, their familiarity with waiting around all day in dancing competitions with flasks of tea and sandwiches, made them a delight for low-budget film-makers to work with. "A lot of kids would just clam up and go into their shells to protect themselves." Not the ballroom dancing kids. Before plunging himself into the milieu, the director's exposure to ballroom dancing was "peripheral", he says. As a child it was his neighbour's ballroom dancing regalia that intrigued him, leaving an indelible image "of a guy in a tuxedo and a girl in a ballgown - a very strong image in my mind".
Later, those anachronistic dresses and rhythms kept swishing tantalisingly by when he found himself rehearsing shows as an actor in dance studios. When he put pen to paper three years ago, this abstract metaphor - "You can view human relationships as a dance - the flirtation, leading to a dance, leading to a falling apart" - met his own preoccupation with the influence parents and children have on each other. And voila - magical or kitschy, whether seen through the lens of Strictly Ballroom, Shall We Dance, or the black and white world of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, he was suddenly faced with the task of representing the real thing. ed representation which, unsurprisingly, makes afficionadoes aficionados wince,
He nudged open doors of meccas like the Beginner's Dance Centre on Parnell Square, assuring the enthusiasts it was just a simple love story he was after - "two 12-year-olds waltz their way through a junior ballroom dancing championship while their two single parents try to continue their secret love affair". The junior ballroom dancing competition scenario allowed the script to run two parallel romances plausibly: "People find it very hard to envisage the two happening at the same time - dad and son going out on a big date - is odd." The film deals with "the tremendous role-play that goes on," exploring whether "Dad in the company of his son has to be dad and can't be boyfriend. And the son has to be son and can't be boyfriend."
Flora Miller, of the erstwhile Granby Danceworks Studio, whose pupils range from age two to 85, took Archbold's film project under her wing. She not only guided Archbold's foray, but along with choreographer David Bolger (well known for the dance sequences in films like Michael Collins) doubled up as choreographer and intermediary, converting Archbold's vision into dance terminology for the ballroom kids.
The ambition was to tell the story through dance: "It begins with a waltz - a graceful introduction, when the couples are slightly awkward with each other. Very formalised, yet distanced. Then it starts to progress to looser more expressive dances as they get more familiar with each other."
The initial intention that the parents' (played by Hilary Reynolds and David Herlihy) story be conducted through dialogue, and the children's through dance, gave way as they started to find that "the parents couldn't exist outside of the kids' dance which spills on to them and dictates them . . . When they are in the throes of their romance the kids are doing the paso doble, one of the most demonstrative and explosive dances." Likening Ballroom to "a fifth religion in the country, which breeds an incredible sense of community and bonding," Archbold compares his adventure to "going underground to the French Resistance". Ballroom is "latent in all of us," he says, even for us members of what Flora Miller, "queen of the ballroom dancing scene", calls the "lost generation' who grew up "dancing around handbags in discos".
Passe? Curiously, along with frontierless cyberspace, the new millennium brings with it the incorporation of ballroom dancing, rechristened "Dance Sport" into the Olympic Games. It is on Sky Sports and the National Geographic Channel where everything from the origin of the tango (two men outdancing each other to win the attention of a lady), to how ballroom dancing demands more physical stamina than, say, synchronised swimming is tossed about as part of a burgeoning debate that could have us all foxtrotting our way into the 2000s.
The Rainbow's End premieres at the IFC on Thursday as part of the RTE/Film Board Short Cuts programme