Compare & Contrast Essay for two films “save the last dance” （2001）and “Street Dance 3D”（2010）

Dance Style Transgression in Films Save the Last Dance and Street Dance 3D
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According to the Oxford dictionary (2020), transgression is “an act that goes against a law, rule, or code of conduct; an offense.” Therefore, transgression from the social norms can cause an outrage from the public acceptance since the people may not approve of what is beyond the status quo. In dance, there are different dance styles that follow specific or traditional movements and elements so that these moves can be categorize into their specific niche. Examples of these dance styles are ballet and breakdancing. In ballet, the common elements involved are specific movements that follows the rhythm of classical music with elaborate body control such as the pointe technique where a ballet dancer places all the body weight at the tip of their toes (Clarke & Crisp, 1992). Breakdancing, on the other hand, involves rough breaks, physically intense power movements, top rock, down rock, and freezes that usually follow the beat of rap music and hip-hop (Breakdancing/B-boying/Breaking, n.d.). However, in the context of the two movies, Save the Last Dance by Thomas Carter (2001) and Street Dance 3D by Max Giwa and Dania Pasquini (2010), transgression is the action taken by the characters in the films to innovate the standards of their character's traditional dance style preference. Although there are many dance elements involved in the films, the transgression of dance style of breakdancing and ballet should further be studied since it contributes to the improvement of dance art from its traditional norm in society and further cater a dancer’s self-expression. Both movies revolved around the dance styles breakdancing and ballet where the main characters use the combination of both elements of these dance styles to make their own unique brand of dance art via the transgression of the current status quo of a specific dance style tradition.
In the film Save the Last Dance (2001), Sara Johnson's goal is to be accepted at a prestigious performing art school Juilliard by auditioning her ballet piece; however, she failed her initial attempt. She quit her passion in ballet and enrolled in another school at Chicago where s...