Rebels on Pointe

If you're one of those people who eagerly waits for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo to show up at the Joyce just before Christmas, well, this is not your year. But a consolation prize is Rebels on Pointe, a delightful documentary about the all-gay-male comedy ballet company, lovingly chronicled by director Bobbi Jo Hart.

Tory Dobrin, the wry dancer who joined in 1980 and is now its director, narrates the history of the troupe, founded in 1974. Its roster now includes sixteen dancers. Hart concentrates attention on four of them: veterans Robert Carter and Raffaele Morra, relative newcomer and award-winning hotshot Chase Johnsey, and Cuban emigré Carlos Hopuy, a brilliant dancer too short for the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. As the Trocks cross the country and the oceans (they spend two hundred days a year on the road), we watch these four reunite with their parents—Morra in Fossano, Italy, and the others in Fort Lauderdale, where their Southern and Cuban mothers sit together in the theater.

Serious balletomanes will find much to appreciate here; people who delight in seeing the form lampooned will find more. These guys (among whom are three married couples) are gorgeous dancers, respectful of ballet's four-hundred-year-old tradition; they're brash and funny, they're changing the world, and they have power to spare.