Last night Courtney and I took our first steps towards becoming twinkle-toed dancers for the inevitable season of weddings which loom on the calendar’s horizon (sometime around June). Swing Dance for Beginners happened at the Twelve Corners Presbyterian Church in Rochester, and by God it’s a sprawling edifice. I have decided all dance classes are essentially alike, but with regional variations. American can claim rights to two in particular: the first is the ever-present name tag, although thankfully they weren’t pre-printed with “Hello, my name is.” The second is that the instructors wear the kind of obvious microphone headsets reminiscent of late eighties Madonna or twenty-first century call centre workers.
They also had one of those cool CD decks beloved of club DJs which allow you to slow down the speed of the recording. If I hadn’t been concentrating so hard on my feet I’d have been eyeing it enviously. And one, two, dou-ble-step, dou-ble-step.
They patiently took us through the basic step structure and I lost my way only once, although this did entail hopping around like Steve Martin in the Jerk with his honky rhythm deficiency, trying to get back on the beat. Still, no-one laughed. When I recovered I looked up and everyone else was doing the Steve Martin dance too. Several partners and a pair of moist armpits later (mostly from the stress of being watched by the more advanced class who had gathered at the back of the room) we were sent off into the night to argue with our partners about which of the other people we’d danced with we fancied. I got three hotties, Courtney just got old men.
Our Swing-themed night was rounded off with Belleville Rendez-Vous (or the Triplets of Belleville) at the Little. It’s an inventive animation with an eye for the absurd, stereotypical and grotesque. It takes a range of potent cultural myths and throws them into the blender. Its only flaw it that it outsmarts itself at the climax by dissolving into a hackneyed chase that does not suit the genre.
Many people who have seen it have commented “I’ve never seen anything like it before. It’s nothing like Disney!” This is true, but whoever said all animation had to be like Disney? There’s a long tradition (more so, I think, in Europe) of animation and absurdism. Animated precedents for Belleville Rendez-Vous include the surrealist animation of Jan Svankmajer, Gosciny and Uderzo’s Asterix and – possibly – the Brothers Quay. It also draws on the live-action exploits of Jacques Tati (did anyone spot the M. Houlot poster in the Triplets’ apartment?) and adopts and absurdist tone throughout.
The music, like the visuals, are a heady hodge-podge, blending swing, blues, hot club (there’s a brief appearance by an animated Django Reinhardt, whose hands are those of Mickey Mouse – a fantastic joke if you know anything about the reduced finger count of both characters), musique concrete and club music. I think it won an Oscar for best song, and quite right too.
I’m calling it Belleville Rendez-Vous because of the three official titles, that’s the one that suits it best. The triplets are accomplices, not the main characters. I don’t think that counts as a spoiler.
