Task: Sentiment Analysis
Input (English): Beautiful and Unique, but oddly frustrating . Dancing on Dangerous Ground is best described as a ballet expressed through the medium of Irish dance. The costuming is modern and the acts form a very cohesive story (much more so than Riverdance), but the superposition of romance, tragedy, and war on a dance invented for celebration seems...contradictory at best.     The performance is technically excellent, and for some, the military scenes alone will make the DVD worth it. But the Irish Legend - a tale of a first officer and a queen who betray their king not unlike Lancelot and Guinevere - has Griana truncating her forms so as not to bounce too much during her lament, and both leads trying to express longing without breaking Irish posture during their romance. In that sense, watching Dancing on Dangerous Ground is kind of like admiring a painting of the sunset over a tropical beach done in glorious black and white. Even if you think black and white photography is beautiful, and love sunsets and the tropics, you end up wishing that the painter had chosen to change either the subject, or the medium.     The one place where medium and subject DO work well is in the military scenes, where Irish precision is put to amazing use; then the watcher can feel the rhythm and the power conveyed, even through the TV screen. But in the scenes in between, I found myself craving a no-hold-barred energetic number that expressed the joy of Irish dance (like the ones which made Riverdance famous), and wishing for the full upper-body expression of a ballet during some oddly stilted during laments and romantic scenes.     As an Irish dance piece it's well executed, and as a ballet the costuming is inventive and the music beautiful, but there's an odd quality to watching it. Sometimes it gives the impression of muted color, sometimes of undersold majesty, but always there's the feel that the passion, while *almost* there, is somehow still missing.
Output (English): NEG