Just Dance
A happy binge

While everyone is raving about Navillera, I thought I’d use this occasion to write about the “other” dance show that the kdrama world has produced – Just Dance. When I first saw the title and the poster of this drama, I thought this would be your run-of-the-mill coming-of-age drama, about a bunch of underdog kids winning a dance contest, finding their dream, etc., etc. For the longest time, I kept away from this for this reason. I didn’t want to watch another cliched story. What a surprise I was in for when I finally started, and binged it!, over one weekend.

It was eight hour-long episodes about a young girl and her classmates navigating through family, love and life in their last year of high school. A group of underdogs come under the wing of a caring teacher, who teaches them dance and life lessons while they figure out their future.  On paper, it’s a very simple story.  But in execution, it dealt with some very complex issues, showing incredible depth in the story writing especially towards the end of the show.

The tagline of this show should have been, “the pursuit of happiness” (literally, although there’s a hat tip to the movie somewhere in between the show as well). The romance was incidental and I paid limited attention to that. The questions tackled were of a serious philosophical order: What is happiness? What makes someone happy? Does the answer to happiness lie in achieving your goal? What happens if you don’t have a goal? How long do you / must you keep trying to achieve your goal? How do you distinguish the feeling of happiness from a merely ‘pleasant’ feeling?

Along the way, it also very briefly touched on darker topics such as suicide, depression, mental health, but in a way that embraced the larger warmer tone of the drama. (Indeed the drama had this warm film to it, that gave it a dreamlike feeling).

This was the first in a long time that I could actually relate to the characters. The conversations and the internal monologues of the schoolgirls felt very real and personal, and reminded me of my own monologues and conversations with friends and peers. It assured me that everyone goes through the same things, and that there really are no answers, and sometimes, just the act of asking the questions is the beginning you need.  

I also paid closer attention to the form of storytelling, since the director is the same as that of the very fine Forest of Secrets 2. I realised a few similarities. The director has terrific control over the story. This story was a quiet story, even though it was about young adults and dance (both being subjects that would be termed “high energy”). But the director employed some interesting tricks to imbue the story with action, notably through using multiple camera angles for every dialogue. I don’t know the technical terms for it, but in almost every conversation, we had close ups, long shots, POV shots, diagonal frames, zoom outs.

The other thing I noticed was the movement between these shots and between scenes generally – it was so smooth and seamless! there was no awkward cutting or interruption. The editing was absolutely top class. These are two features that were immediately comparable with FOS2. I came away with the thought that this director knows what he’s doing, for sure.

Overall, this show comes highly recommended for those who haven’t seen it. For those who have and who’ve recommended this to me over the past several months, thank you 🙏 This was truly a beautiful find!