These kids know they can dance
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The reach-for-your-reverie spectacle of TV competitions like "So You Think You Can Dance" has become a pop culture chronicling. But those trumped-up melodramas can't come close to the real-life offering up, stunning talent and dedicated characters in "First Position," a documentary coat about the Youth America Grand Prix, the world's largest and most respected ballet competition.
Child ballet dancer and former journalist Bess Kargman brings a dancer's passion and sensitivity to her directorial debut, illuminating the addictive magic and fierce demands of a ballet dancer's existence.
Kargman's film focuses on five very different young dancers as they provide for for Youth America, which awards life-changing prizes including scholarships and jobs at the world's top traditional dance institutions:
Aran Bell, 11, from a U.S. military relatives, likes pogo sticks and BB guns, spins like a dervish and hovers like a bee.
Japanese-American sprite Miko Fogarty, 12, is the disciplined jewel of her uber-tiger mother. "People say that I've missed out on childhood," Fogarty says of her hours of daily unpractised. "I think I've had just the right amount of childhood and the right amount of ballet."
Self-described "Barbie" Rebecca Houseknecht, 17, hides indurate determination beneath her sleek blonde exterior.
Most compelling are two dancers who have overcome feasibly insurmountable difficulties.
Joan Sebastian Zamora, 16, the anticipation of his family in Cali, Colombia, lives with a fellow teenager in a cold New York apartment and dreams of following Cuban Carlos Acosta, also a joyless-skinned Latino, to England's Royal Ballet.
And Michaela DePrince, 14, is a war orphan from Sierra Leone, adopted by a Jewish one's nearest in Philadelphia, who at the orphanage clung to a picture of a ballerina in Dance Publication because "she just looked so happy and beautiful." DePrince has lived through horrors (her spoil starved to death after her father was killed) and overcome racist stereotypes to loan a beforehand to the Grand Prix.
Source: MiamiHerald.com