WHEN THE COMPANY OF ELDERS made their contemporary dance debut at Sadler's Wells, presumably no-one backstage dared wish them "break a leg" – they'd be more likely to break a hip. For this unique dance company, featured in a lovely Imagine... fil
m this week, are aged between 61 and 85. Most didn't take any dance lessons until they got their bus passes and none were professionals. Between them they have had various hip replacements, glaucoma, bunions, osteoporosis and heart surgeries. Yet they work with leading choreographers and have performed all over the world.
At first this profile by Alan Yentob seems straightforward: isn't it smashing that these game old codgers are still alive and high-kicking? People say admiring things, such as "It shows us all that it's never too late!" and the Elders themselves enthuse about how dancing together has changed their lives.
Several have inspiring stories: the youngest, Alison, suffered a brain tumour in her twenties and couldn't walk, talk, see, hear or even eat unaided for years. Although she's still suffering from major health problems, dancing with the group allows her to enjoy something she missed out on in her youth. There's Jeff, 85, a retired engineer who went ballroom dancing with his late wife for 60 years; now he takes six classes a week, from salsa to Lindy Hop and is bursting with energy. Gladys says she looked at various retirement clubs but "all they could offer me was bingo and cups of tea and biscuits". She wanted something more challenging.
Eve, who played Captain Jack's wife in Torchwood, is one of the few to have been on stage before. She struggles to keep up with the steps and you start to feel patronisingly sorry for her. Then she reveals that she is recovering from a fall that broke her arm in three places and sprained her foot, plus complications from cancer treatment. "I can't really feel my foot doing it," she explains, "but I'm still dancing."
It's impressive, and watching how choreographer Chris Tudor works with the company to devise a piece based on their own memories is interesting. But as preparations go on for a major performance of their first new contemporary dance piece, the film raises deeper questions about the rules we impose on ourselves – what's "appropriate" at certain ages – and the limitations on art. The Company of Elders can't compete with the graceful beauty of young dancers, but that's not the point. Art, surely, shouldn't be just for the young or the beautiful, nor hived away as something to be done by "professionals" to a certain standard and watched by everyone else.
And simply seeing these older bodies expressing themselves is a powerful statement. As the veteran choreographer Richard Alston says, "When you see people at the end of their lives dancing, they really are putting their hands up for life. They won't be able to move when they leave this Earth... It's a fantastic form of defiance."
Also pushing his body to its limits this week is James May, who heads up the BBC's short season commemorating the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. Watching James May's Moon Landing, at first I wondered why the celebration of such a historic event should be handed over to the guy usually known as "the one off Top Gear that isn't Jeremy Clarkson or the one who crashed". But perhaps it's fitting, since the moon landing wasn't really about science but symbolism, more notable for having been done than what came out of it. That suits May's childish enthusiasm, which doesn't examine it too closely, just revels in the basic "wow!" of it all (it is annoying, though, when he says things like, "In my imagination, (astronauts] live on Tracey Island, eat food out of toothpaste tubes and everything in their life goes 'whoosh!'." The man is 46).
May meets real astronauts and undergoes some of the unpleasant training – spun around in a centrifuge – as well as the fun of floating in zero-gravity while trying to do a piece to camera. It's all to prepare him for a flight at 70,000ft, which is not really space but was classified as such in the 1950s (James May On The Edge Of Space is a sort of DVD extra for this, covering the survival training in more detail but repeating some of the same footage). It seems like an amazing experience, seeing the curvature of the planet, but May isn't capable of any great insights, other than that if everyone could go up there, it would completely change "global politics, religion, education – everything". It would also get a bit crowded.
