Stomp the Yard

Of all the things to fight about, you’d think dancing would be way down the list. Yet ‘Stomp the Yard’ does everything in its power to sully the good name of the backstreet dance-off by thrusting us into a particularly heated terpsichorean rivalry which ends with DJ (Columbus Short) witnessing the murder of his younger brother. Naturally, he decides to flee to a southern university whereupon he joins a frat house and takes up stepping: an amalgam of body popping, tap, beat poetry, mime and silly costumes (British counterpoint: morris dancing). Sylvain White’s baffling film is propelled by its choppy editing and soap-opera histrionics, inhabiting a world where ‘pride’, ‘honour’ and ‘taking one for the team’ rule the day. The competitive element to this sporting anomaly is never really touched upon, leaving genre expectation to explain away the inevitable outcome of the final step showdown rather than a less-than-credible form of judging which seems to be an entirely arbitrary mixture of whooping and crying. Alongside a subplot revealing the hegemonous perks of joining a fraternity house, there’s little here for British eyes.