Ballet laughs
LES Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo – to give them their full name – sprang out of the Stonewall protests on New York’s Lower West Side in the late-1960s and early-1970s.
While the protests were an impassioned and occasionally violent response to the brutality and wrongheadedness of America’s anti-gay policing, the Trocs – as everyone calls them – just wanted to dance.
Which, as this enlightening and wildly entertaining film proves, turns out to be a pretty bold and political statement of its own.
The Trocs came together to simultaneously send-up and celebrate the tradition of classical ballet, and also to have all the fun they could in an art form that is known for being rigidly formal, while concealing just how much strength and technique it takes to subvert and deconstruct a dance while still absolutely nailing its key moments.
Small wonder that dancers with traditional ballet companies are some of the Trocs’ biggest fans.
Rebels on Pointe – on the terrifically good Films For Change platform – takes us through four decades of the Trocs’ life on the road in a style that suits the triumph and tragedy of the company’s history, as they upended the memory of all those Russian ballet companies who had toured America and the world for decades, desperate for foreign currency even while their stars and finances were clearly falling apart.
Rebels on Pointe is ultimately a film about the bravery it takes just to be your own damn self, in a world full of rules that weren’t written by anyone who could imagine a person like you existing. As one dancer puts it: ‘‘You don’t have to fit in, but you do have to function.’’
Speaking of rebels in New York, the writer, neurologist and self-confessed oddball Oliver Sacks has a life no fiction writer could pedal.
Sacks became a household name in the 1990s. He was played by Robin Williams in the box office smash Awakenings, and his collection of writings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, became an international bestseller.
Sacks’ name was a byword for an impassioned, non-traditional and radically empathetic approach to mental disorders, that demanded the doctor see the world through the patient’s eyes and work with them accordingly.
But Sacks’ own early life was the opposite of what I imagined.
That this early bad boy of the leather scene, compulsive body builder, suicidal amphetamine addict and late-night motorbike vagabond would eventually grow into the teddy-bearish and unsinkably happy man he became, is a goddamn miracle.
Oliver Sacks: His Own Life isa brilliant and unexpectedly raucous tribute to the man, available on DocPlay.