Dance Academy
Dance Academy has been one of my more embarrassing obsessions of the last six months. It's an Australian kids series aimed at pre- and early-teen girls, which usually means it would be cute, but not overwhelming.
Dance Academy is cute, and is sometimes merely whelming, but if you enjoy female-heavy teen drama with lots of dancing and some gratuitous Sydney porn, it's pretty great.
It's set at the National Academy of Dance, a fictional school based right in the centre of Sydney, overlooking the harbour, within walking distance of all the significant landmarks. The heroine is Tara Webster, a sweet, naive fifteen year old country girl whose dreams come true when she's accepted to the Academy.
Then it turns out her acceptance was marginal -- she's the weakest dancer in her class -- and her peers are ... well, she's sharing a room with Abigail, who starts off as every teen movie's mean girl cliche. Her best friends are Kat, who is rebelling against ballet culture, and Sammy, the next worst dancer in the class. The boy she likes (Ethan, Kat's older half-brother) won't give her the time of day, and she's partnered with bad boy Christian.
VARIOUS CLICHES ENSUE.
But it's like the cliches are just there to set the groundwork for everything that follows. Tara is nice and sweet, but she's also the queen of bad decisions, and she has to deal with the consequences. Tara gets an inordinate amount of hatred in the fandom, for having three boyfriends in two season (SLUT!), for letting people walk all over her, for standing up for herself too much, for not taking ballet seriously enough. So, you know, your standard female character thing. At first I thought she was a bland character, and she's certainly the world's victim for the first few episodes, but then I started to appreciate her personality.
Abigail gets all the fandom love that Tara misses out on, partially because she Takes Ballet Seriously. (I think a lot of the fans are themselves dancers.) Abigail is manipulative and cruel because she's desperately focused on excelling, and cannot cope with the consequences of failure. (She also turns out to be hilariously socially awkward when she's out of her depth.) I friend-ship her with Tara and Kat.
Kat is the Bad Girl. Her mother's a principal dancer, her father's a top choreographer, she's a talented dancer herself, and she doesn't want any of it. Her arc so far has involved coming to terms with her parents, and figuring what she does want and how to work for it, but she also gets called out a lot for wasting an opportunity that could have gone to someone else, and for treating other people carelessly.
The second season introduces Grace, who really is a mean girl, expelled from a prestigious school in Britain and making trouble in Sydney. I hate her, but I love her, and I'm afraid to see what she does in season 3.
The girls deal with romance, of course, which I initially found boring but wound up cheering/gaping/hiding my eyes over. But they also have stories about developing professionalism in a field that overtly sets women against each other, and finding a balance between emotional and professional commitments. They also deal with their families (especially mothers, in the case of Kat and Abigail), and the challenge of growing as artists in an extremely formalised area of dance.
The boys have their own arcs, away from romance. Christian has a criminal background, which made me roll my eyes, because of course the inner city Asian kid is a criminal. But that was actually dealt with pretty well. Sammy has to contend with his disapproving father, who wants him to become a doctor ("I know we don't like to talk about it, but your grandfather was only a dermatologist"). Ethan ... well, Ethan has some issues about his dad, but he's reduced to a recurring character in season 2, so that's okay. Season 2 introduces Ben Tickle, who starts out trying to be cool and winds up looking like a jerk (there is a Very Special Episode about how it's not okay to use "gay" as a pejorative), and later brings in Ollie, an egotistical older dancer who is a love interest for one of the boys. (He also breaks up the BLINDING WHITENESS of the cast, and will apparently be a regular in season 3.)
A lot of the boys' stories address their relationship with the Australian construct of masculinity that ennobles athletes but disregards dancers, but also turns their own assumptions upside down when Sammy is asked out by a hunky football player.
Season 1 of Dance Academy is available on Netflix in the US, and the whole series (so far) is available though the usual sources elsewhere. It has a big fandom on Tumblr, which is quite charming except when they're slut shaming Tara. The third and finale season will be airing in Australia in the next few months.
Dance Academy is cute, and is sometimes merely whelming, but if you enjoy female-heavy teen drama with lots of dancing and some gratuitous Sydney porn, it's pretty great.
It's set at the National Academy of Dance, a fictional school based right in the centre of Sydney, overlooking the harbour, within walking distance of all the significant landmarks. The heroine is Tara Webster, a sweet, naive fifteen year old country girl whose dreams come true when she's accepted to the Academy.
Then it turns out her acceptance was marginal -- she's the weakest dancer in her class -- and her peers are ... well, she's sharing a room with Abigail, who starts off as every teen movie's mean girl cliche. Her best friends are Kat, who is rebelling against ballet culture, and Sammy, the next worst dancer in the class. The boy she likes (Ethan, Kat's older half-brother) won't give her the time of day, and she's partnered with bad boy Christian.
VARIOUS CLICHES ENSUE.
But it's like the cliches are just there to set the groundwork for everything that follows. Tara is nice and sweet, but she's also the queen of bad decisions, and she has to deal with the consequences. Tara gets an inordinate amount of hatred in the fandom, for having three boyfriends in two season (SLUT!), for letting people walk all over her, for standing up for herself too much, for not taking ballet seriously enough. So, you know, your standard female character thing. At first I thought she was a bland character, and she's certainly the world's victim for the first few episodes, but then I started to appreciate her personality.
Abigail gets all the fandom love that Tara misses out on, partially because she Takes Ballet Seriously. (I think a lot of the fans are themselves dancers.) Abigail is manipulative and cruel because she's desperately focused on excelling, and cannot cope with the consequences of failure. (She also turns out to be hilariously socially awkward when she's out of her depth.) I friend-ship her with Tara and Kat.
Kat is the Bad Girl. Her mother's a principal dancer, her father's a top choreographer, she's a talented dancer herself, and she doesn't want any of it. Her arc so far has involved coming to terms with her parents, and figuring what she does want and how to work for it, but she also gets called out a lot for wasting an opportunity that could have gone to someone else, and for treating other people carelessly.
The second season introduces Grace, who really is a mean girl, expelled from a prestigious school in Britain and making trouble in Sydney. I hate her, but I love her, and I'm afraid to see what she does in season 3.
The girls deal with romance, of course, which I initially found boring but wound up cheering/gaping/hiding my eyes over. But they also have stories about developing professionalism in a field that overtly sets women against each other, and finding a balance between emotional and professional commitments. They also deal with their families (especially mothers, in the case of Kat and Abigail), and the challenge of growing as artists in an extremely formalised area of dance.
The boys have their own arcs, away from romance. Christian has a criminal background, which made me roll my eyes, because of course the inner city Asian kid is a criminal. But that was actually dealt with pretty well. Sammy has to contend with his disapproving father, who wants him to become a doctor ("I know we don't like to talk about it, but your grandfather was only a dermatologist"). Ethan ... well, Ethan has some issues about his dad, but he's reduced to a recurring character in season 2, so that's okay. Season 2 introduces Ben Tickle, who starts out trying to be cool and winds up looking like a jerk (there is a Very Special Episode about how it's not okay to use "gay" as a pejorative), and later brings in Ollie, an egotistical older dancer who is a love interest for one of the boys. (He also breaks up the BLINDING WHITENESS of the cast, and will apparently be a regular in season 3.)
A lot of the boys' stories address their relationship with the Australian construct of masculinity that ennobles athletes but disregards dancers, but also turns their own assumptions upside down when Sammy is asked out by a hunky football player.
Season 1 of Dance Academy is available on Netflix in the US, and the whole series (so far) is available though the usual sources elsewhere. It has a big fandom on Tumblr, which is quite charming except when they're slut shaming Tara. The third and finale season will be airing in Australia in the next few months.