Stepping High 2013

Sima, while stunningly beautiful, has failed to fulfill her dreams as a professional dancer. She is on the wrong side of 30 and being aged out, and she is forced to take a job as a teacher in a conservative local high school. Much to her surprise, it sparks the choreographer in her, a talent she has been nurturing in private not only to battle her self-doubt and depression but to create a new, unique fusion of belly and ballroom styles. As one who throws her heart and soul into everything she does, her life inevitably entwines with those of her students, a diverse group of teens, both in the classroom and outside it. Sima becomes re-energized. She opens the kids’ eyes and minds to dance as a powerful tool for social change. Not everyone likes her progressive ideas. When she introduces them to her belly/ballroom style, tensions escalate. Race, class, culture, teen romance, Sima’s personal failures in her relationship with her parents and her boyfriend, all of which have been building silently, intersect for an emotional explosion. Yet the only way out is for Sima and her students to perform her controversial dance on the biggest stage to a hostile audience in a volatile, charged climax that is a powder keg on a short fuse.