Ballerina Boys

At age three, Philip Martin-Nielson was diagnosed with severe autism. He didn’t speak his first words until he was five. Yet by the time he turned eighteen, he was touring the world with New York City’s all-male comic ballet company Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. Emmy-winning filmmaker Chana Gazit and dance educator Martie Barylick’s Ballerina Boys captures Philip’s journey from finding his voice through dance to fulfilling his lifelong dream — not just dancing professionally in a world-renowned company, but performing solo roles normally reserved for prima ballerinas. Following Philip and his fellow “Trocks” on a European tour and a road trip through North and South Carolina, the film travels in and out of rehearsal spaces, performance halls, touring buses, and the past, tapping a trove of archival material. 

Philip’s unlikely tale is inseparable from the larger story of the Trocks, a company full of former little boys who wanted to be ballerinas. Combining drag and classical ballet to hilarious — and breathtaking — effect, the Trocks have been performing loving parodies of works like Swan Lake since the early 1970s, for audiences as far-flung as Finland, China, and Galveston, Texas. In the course of telling their story, and Philip’s, Ballerina Boys explores issues ranging from gender fluidity to the autism spectrum to arts education funding. Offering a window into the lives of those existing outside the sometimes tightly guarded realm of “normal,” it chronicles these artists’ struggles for legitimacy and recognition.