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How many dance documentaries are intimate and tender? You can count on the fingers of one hand, I’m afraid. And how many are both affectionate and accepting of the brevity of mastery, control and audience adulation? Still fewer, alas.

Keep Dancing helps to remedy that situation, demonstrating not only the validity, but the necessity to do exactly what the title states. Donald Saddler and Marge Champion are both 90; they get together twice a week to take a barre, to choreograph and to pal around with each other.

There are clips from their earlier careers. Saddler was part of American Ballet Theater’s first season in 1940 and danced in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway Hit High Button Shoes prior to becoming a choreographer. Marge Champion was the daughter of Ernest Belcher, a household word in the Los Angeles ballet world in the 20’s and 30’s, the model for Snow White in the Disney Film and then one half of the Gower and Marge Champion ballroom and MGM musical team before Gower moved into directing musicals and television.

This 19-minute documentary provides a glimpse into the Saddler-Champion get togethers, weaving their early lives and professional careers in and out of their current dailyness. Like memory as we age, one never knows when an image will flood the vision or the inner horizon, gently, thoroughly, evoking a smile, sometimes a sob or catch in the throat, unbidden. The momentary flash is something to cherish, to absorb its availability and to accept that such glimpses cannot be forced or dictated. Like the rhythm of the film and the adroit emergence and receding of the glimpses of these two dancers at their peak, one is caught by life’s trajectory. If one is shrewd enough to welcome the path as Saddler and Champion have, the progression carries its own magic.

Can one call a film about life’s twilight glorious? I think so. This intimate, tender vista of twilight, Keep Dancing is exactly that. Bless the subjects, Donald Saddler and Marge Champion, for providing and sharing this illumination. I don’t know when and how the film will make it across the Atlantic, but do high tail it to the location. You will not be disappointed.