Casey Mazzoli
Goldman, M. (Director). Goldman, M. (Executive Producer). (2025). Why We Dance. New Day Films. 36 mins. Why We Dance is born out of director Michal Goldman's personal experience in a dance class led by Ketty Rosenfeld. The class, originally held in the Senior Center of Newton, MA, moved to Zoom during COVID-19 lockdowns, and Goldman documented the way Rosenfeld's class cultivated joy, community, and engagement with life despite unprecedented limitations. One of the film's greatest strengths is that it makes plenty of room for the ways participants' personal desires draw them to dance. They express a craving for embodied hobbies and exercise and a desire to connect with the emotions of the songs-- to feel young, to feel sexy, to find a respite from stress. Many of the participants are also aging, immigrants, or both, and dance entered their lives via their family's cultural expressions of dance when they themselves were young. Now that they are parents and grandparents, the new community afforded to participants by Rosenfeld's classes brings this theme full circle. Without question, this film is a joyful watch. The participants' candid emotions are the core of the film, and it carries an untarnished sincerity that speaks to the value of experiences like Rosenfeld's class physically, emotionally, and socially. That being said, its primary goal is to present or share in the experience of the participants, not to inquire, inform, or analyze. There is no self-evident educational use for the film, so it would need to be contextualized if used in an educational setting. This could be done in the health, social sciences, and humanities disciplines by using the film to prompt a discussion of quality of life while aging, by showing it as an example of the benefits of exercise classes as an intervention for various communities, or by asking students to examine the social, emotional, and cultural experiences of the participants. More likely than not, it would need to be supplementary to other educational content. For these reasons, Why We Dance is an enjoyable film that many viewers could connect with, but it is not exceptionally well-suited for educational settings.