There is little more exciting than to see a dancer in his prime rehearsing all the movements and gestures that will make up a final piece of dance. A dancer has an athlete’s musculature, stamina, and grace---or is it the other way around? Both bodies are difficult to achieve, and it takes hours and hours of practice for an athlete and an equal number of hard-worked days of practice for either to achieve the goal set out for them. Dancers have an innate madness about them. They must dance. They push their bodies to the breaking point, and they ultimately triumph over the difficulties to present a thing of beauty called “the dance.”

In director Alan Brown’s film Five Dances, we are taken to a dreary, barren rehearsal studio in Soho, New York, to watch four dancers rehearse the five dances choreographer Anthony (Luke Murphy) has created for them to perform on stage.

The main character is 18-year-old Chip Daniel, a recent transplant from Kansas where he grew up as a hayseed. Chip is played by the excellent dancer Ryan Steele, a now-prominent dancer in real-life New York dance circles. As most boys do, they want to start off on their own and cut the apron strings. But mom (voiced in phone conversations by actress Lulu Roche) pleads with Chip to come home “where he belongs. She’s an alcoholic and a handful for the poor kid. He is torn by wanting to begin his own life and become a professional dancer and wrestling with the heart-felt desire to please his mother, who is all alone.

Chip not only has a nagging mother to contend with. He is also going through the usual growing pains of every 18-year-old, male or female. He doesn’t know who exactly he is, where he fits, or what his own sexuality is.

The best scenes in the movie are, of course, of the dancing. Choreographer Anthony really puts the quartet of talented dancers through their paces. Steele is given the most footage as he is, by far, the best dancer of them all. He twists and turns and leaps through the air like a latter-day Rudolph Nureyev. It’s a treat to watch Steele go through his routines and rehearsal paces. No doubt, he is the star of this film.

Things become a little more complicated in his life when Theo (dancer Reed Luplau of Australia) encourages Chip to explore his long-dormant sexuality during a beautifully photographed, but gratuitous, love-making sequence. But the major emphasis in the film is the dancing, and all those audiences who love seeing the grace and beauty of modern dance mixed with balletic moves will be delighted with the sparsely-budgeted bouquet to the world of dance.

On an informational note, Ryan Steele (b. 1990), originated the role of Specs in the 2012 musical “Newsies.”  He began dancing at age five and later studied at Juilliard School. He began his career by playing Baby John in the 2009 revival of Sondheim’s “West Side Story “ at New York’s Palace Theatre. His other theatre appearances include “Matilda,” the national tour of “An American in Paris” in 2016 and “Carousel” in 2018. He managed to squeeze in many television appearances on shows such as the hit “Smash,” “Peter Pan Live!” and the 87th Academy Awards Show. His most recent film appearance was in 2020’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things.

(Released by Wolfe Releasing, and rated “TV-14” by MMPA. Available on Amazon Prime.)