by MARK SLUTSKY

You don't usually imagine 11-year-old kids doing the rumba or the merengue, much less in a skilled and serious manner, but this amusing image is at the centre of Mad Hot Ballroom, a documentary about New York City kids ballroom dancing. It's kind of like Spellbound, with fancy footwork in the place of sophisticated spelling.

In 1995, the NYC public school board instituted a ballroom dancing program for fifth-grade kids, and with it came a competition called the Rainbow Team Matches, a city-wide competition to crown the best pint-sized practitioners of the rumba, the merengue, the tango, the foxtrot and swing. Director Marilyn Agrelo followed these kids and their teachers for the 10 weeks leading up to the big competition.

The schools are suitably diverse, providing a good slice of New York - P.S. 150, in Tribeca, with its wealthier, trendier kids; Brooklyn's P.S. 112, with a population of almost half-and-half Italian-Americans and recent Asian immigrants; and P.S. 115 in Washington Heights, where 97 per cent of the students are on the poverty line, and most are immigrants from the Dominican Republic.

There's a lot to like about this movie. The kids, who we see largely in dance class and in informal interview settings, are uniformly charming, as are the adults, who really seem to believe in the program. You get a real cross-section of junior New York in Mad Hot Ballroom, which is both a blessing and a curse. With so many kids to focus on, however, you lose a little detail - I'd have liked to have spent more time with fewer kids, which is where the film diverges from the Spellbound model.

Regardless, you really do feel like cheering them on, and while the final competition isn't exactly a nail-biter, it's hard not to be invested in the outcome (especially as you see the teary result of one school's elimination earlier on). It may not be the most urgent movie in the world, but it's a doc kids will love, which is a rare thing.

Mad Hot Ballroom opens Friday, June 3

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