Fifth-graders across three New York City public schools spend a semester learning the merengue, tango, and rumba as part of an in-school ballroom dance program, working toward a citywide competition that narrows thousands of students down to a handful of finalists. The camera follows kids from a Bensonhurst school, a Washington Heights school, and a Tribeca school, letting their different neighborhoods and different reasons for competing sit side by side without ranking them. Interviews catch the students being blunt about crushes, self-consciousness, and what winning would mean, while gym teachers and dance instructors work kids who initially refuse to touch a partner into confident competitors. The tournament itself, with its brackets and nervous parents in folding chairs, gives the film its structure and its suspense. What holds the whole thing together is the wager underneath the program: that a dance class can teach discipline and composure to ten-year-olds that nothing else in their school day reaches.