Reviews

Arlene Croce, the great American dance critic who wrote for The New Yorker from 1973 to 1996, died on Monday morning, the day before Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo lifted the curtain on its December season at the Joyce Theater.

Many of Croce’s reviews — witty, biting and full of trenchant observations, both harsh and beautiful — were works of art themselves, including one from 1974 about the debut of Les Ballets Trockadero in a loft on 14th Street. The stage was the size of a handkerchief. The corps de ballet was a lonely five dancers.

New York, Croce wrote, “‘the dance capital of the world,’ has long needed a company of madmen to break us all up.”

Fifty years later, the madmen are still at it.

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Need-to-know Japanese vocabulary: utsukushi (beautiful); kanpeki (perfect); oishii (delicious) – all three of which could be used to describe the Trocks’ visit to Yokohama on Sunday afternoon.

The all-male Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo is 50 this year, and has been visiting Japan since 1982; the current tour is their 32nd. The country is a big ballet consumer and exporter- the Royal Ballet alone has three Japanese principals- and visiting troupes are always popular, but “gender-skewering” (the Trocks’ term) has an added appeal in the land of the onnagata, the fragrant male heroines of the kabuki theatre.

The predominantly female fan base established in the early 1980s has stayed loyal to the Trocks, returning with children and grandchildren to savour the bravura technique and deadpan comic timing timing of the new generation of dancers. The repertoire remains the usual canny mix of ancient and modern. Warmed up by a pratfalling Swan Lake Act 2, the audience is then treated to a second act of shorter works and extracts, followed by a grand final of twirling tutus.

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As a seasoned hack and a theatre critic my friends and colleagues will tell you it takes a lot to make me laugh out loud when watching a performance – in fact I can count the times on one hand in the last few years, despite reviewing literally 100’s of shows, that this has happened.

But even before the actual performance by Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo had began I found myself actually laughing out loud at the pre-show announcements.

For years I had been promising myself I must see ‘The Trocks’ as they are called but something job related always got in the way but on their first visit for four years my wish was granted.

The first ballet of the Bradford repertoire was Swan Lake Act 2. This was an outstanding piece but to see it danced so technically well was a piece of theatrical brilliance.

It’s hard for men to perform on point as their feet are long and this puts added pressure on their bodies. The entrance of Von Rothbert I found particularly humorous as he did the usual leaps and then stopped to catch his breath and carried on. This for me was a touch of subtle brilliance as this role is usually played by an older dancer in most companies now specialising in character dancing.

I was transfixed. The rest of the programme including A Vivaldi Suite, The Dying Swan and a specially created piece in the classical mode Raymonda’s Wedding was filled with exceptional dancing and high technical standards.. The dances are all pure gold each laced with a subtle humour, wonderful facial expressions and subtle humour that reduce the audience to laughter.

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Ballet is a completely absurd art — and we love it to pieces: that’s what Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo proclaims with every move. The divas and cavaliers of this all-male troupe are — as they present themselves to us in performance — fabulously stupid, artificial, hammy, clichéd, superficial, dated, monstrous. But they simply adore dancing and their audiences, even more than they love makeup and costumes. So, while you laugh at their demented antics, you find yourself watching them with a special tenderness. You’re on their side.

The absurdity and the adorability are perfectly fused in the latest addition to the Trockadero repertory, the pas de six from August Bournonville’s “Napoli” (1842). This production of a dance, made for four women and two men, casts two of its tiniest members as the men, and, despite their male attire, renders them somewhat more feminine in manners and makeup than their four ballerina companions. This is immediately funny, and some of the consequent jokes are funnier: When the men take turns lifting the women, the fourth and largest ballerina solves the imbalance by lifting him instead.

But both the women and the men love Bournonville’s dances, and take wonderful trouble about detailed points of style. There are numerous passages here that aren’t comic — they’re simply joyous. And to watch divas and divos in bliss delights the audience. And then along comes an assortment of other jokes. When one ballerina is doing rather too well in a long solo variation, another one tries — unsuccessfully — to trip her. As yet another ballerina pauses on flat feet to prepare for a multiple pirouette, her features show an expression of goggle-eyed terror: It lasts less than a second, the pirouette goes just fine, and she sweetly resumes the marvelously long, complex phrases of her dance.

The Trocks (as the dance world knows them) are dancing out the old year with a three-week season at the Joyce Theater; there are two programs. Program A, which opened on Tuesday, was announced as a quadruple bill, but was rendered quintuple at short notice by the addition of “The Dying Swan,” a staple of Trocks repertory, in which the ballerina’s tutu molts enough feathers to stuff pillows. She (Maria Paranova) finds time to wave at her audience, but, in her own Trockish way, she takes acting — her idea of acting — very seriously indeed: She executes industrial quantities of swannishness, and gorges herself on the swan’s death throes.

“The Dying Swan” (Saint-Saëns music) seldom shares a program with “Le Lac des Cygnes (Swan Lake, Act II)” (Tchaikovsky music). But here both occur. It’s in “Swan Lake” that I get most bewildered about which sex these performers really are. Prince Siegfried (Vladimir Legupski) and his confidant Benno (Pepe Dufka) have such splendid maquillage. I love the prince’s hairpin, too; and cherish the long sequence when he slowly crosses the stage, pointing his legs and feet elaborately, stretching them straight from the hips like spears — to silence, while nothing else happens. The swans, meanwhile, several of whom have hairy chests visible above their tutus, throw themselves into their dances and their swan behavior with enchanting aggression.

As the Swan Queen, Yakaterina Verbosovich’s often more absurd than anyone, but no less often she’s an outstandingly good dancer. Those quivering petits battements serrés at the end of the adagio, in which the ballerina beats one foot rapidly beside her ankle, like the rapid fluttering of a wingtip, surpass those by quite a number of “real” ballerinas. The amalgam of ballerina finesse and daft diva antics is brilliant, unsettling, riveting: the epitome of Trocks style.

“Patterns in Space” (“choreography after Merce Cunningham”) — the title is a play on Cunningham’s 1986 “Points in Space” — goes straight for all that’s nuttiest about the separation of dance and music in the Cunningham ethos. Lariska Dumbchenko and Yuri Smirnov are the musicians, seated on one side of the stage, and they’re far more solemn than any Cunningham musician ever was, gloriously intense in their percussion effects and farmyard noises.

The program ends with “Raymonda’s Wedding,” a plotless divertissement that nonetheless brilliantly evokes the inexplicable silly story of Marius Petipa’s 1898 ballet. The White Lady (Ida Nevasayneva) presiding graciously over the nuptial celebrations, which, though occurring in Provence, are danced in Hungarian style. The Trocks adopt intensely Hungarian dance behavior (every hand-clapping, head-shaking czardas mannerism) when they remember. Petipa left out fouetté turns, so they rectify that omission; and their joy is infectious.

The best-timed joke of the whole evening comes when Raymonda’s husband, Jean de Brienne (Boris Mudko), runs, mid-exit, straight into a wing and falls flat. Never fear: he’s soon up and dancing. Fire, flood, illness, trauma — nothing could stop Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo from dancing, and all for you, you, you.

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The magic of Les Ballets Trockadero De Monte Carlo is guaranteed to warm any frozen heart that dares walk into their show.

The curtain rises on Von Rothbart in the moonlit woods (notably lit by Kip Marsh). Performed by Jacques D’Aniels (Joshua Thake), he brings a creepy, goofiness to the already absurd character of Von Rothbart. Thake executes clean lines in his arabesques and builds drama by running around the stage, eventually exiting stage left pulling a wooden swan on a string off with him. Additional gags include swan noises, slapping, a croaking frog soundtrack, and alluding to swan poop on the stage.

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Partway through Rebels on Pointe– Bobbi Jo Hart’s marvelous documentary about the all-male, comic, drag dance company Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo- dancer Raffaele Morra teaches a master class to a roomful of elderly women. Some have shown up in tutus and slippers, others wear sweats, many have never taken a ballet lesson. “That’s not important at all,” Morra reassures them. “What’s important is that it’s you, expressing yourself.” And thus, Morra welcomes them in to the famous Dying Swan solo, choreographed by Mikael Fokine for Anna Pavlova in 1905. He demonstrates the extended bourrées, the tilted head, and the impossibly liquid arms. The women do their best approximations. Technically, they aren’t very good, but it’s a beautiful scene: a flock of unlikely but unabashed swans, flying into history.

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What better way to usher in 2025 than with tutus, tiaras and tights? Les Ballet Trockadero de Monte Carlo’s male dancers in drag offer plenty of those as well as an evening of belly shaking laughter and silliness, providing audiences with a refreshing take on a classical dance form. The Trocks (as the company is affectionately called) reminds us not to take ballet, or ourselves, too seriously.

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“They have come to The Pillow as they celebrate their 50th anniversary, in an evening of performances looking back across the years in loving send-up and a celebration. The Trocks are known around the world for their performances of classical and romantic ballet ‘en pointe and en travesti,’ embodying traditional roles with a sense of comedy and confidence and companionship that can expand and transform.”

In these past 50 years, the Trocks have had an important impact—arguably an institutional influence—on the expanding arc of gender understanding in this country and the world, and they have always exercised that influence while bringing both inspiration and genuine belly laughs to their audiences. The Trocks gracefully and ingeniously combine slapstick, farce, and clowning with the pure artistry of dance.

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On Jan. 28, the Trocks returned yet again to UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall with a glorious program of “Swan Lake, Act II,” “Yes, Virginia, Another Piano Ballet,” “The Dying Swan,” “Paquita” and a pas de deux. Bold in scope, the performance beautifully demonstrated the ballet troupe’s diverse and multiform skill set.

The Trocks ended the night with French-style “Paquita.” As the curtains rose, they revealed regal red drapery hanging over the stage, prompting audible “ooohs” from the audience. Though certain moments still came across as distinctly comedic — such as when a dancer was facing the wrong way and subtly (and unsuccessfully) tried to change without the audience noticing — this segment of the performance stood out due to the sheer amount of skill exhibited.

While watching the Trocks, it’s sometimes easy to forget that you’re observing a parody. With each turn and leap across the stage, the dancers display their keen attention to detail and form — they just so happen to do so in a laughter-inducing way.

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Amid the recent fracas about drag performance as a threat to the social fabric, historians remind us that the practice of cross-gender performance on the stage goes back to the earliest days of theater in ancient Greece.

And if later it was good enough for Shakespeare’s day, when women’s characters were played by young males, it was still an intriguing option during the 19th century, when those gender roles were reversed by women in “breeches parts.”

Transgressive? Not always. Funny? If done for comedy and done right.

Which might help explain why an all-male dance troupe, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, is now romping through its 50th year of dance hilarity — and high skills — during extensive tours around the world.

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Their makeup in on point(e). They dance on pointe. But there is something slightly off yet sinfully funny about them. That’s right, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo (or The Trocks, as they are lovingly referenced) will return to Jones Hall on January 23 with skillful dance work and and hilarious takes on beloved ballets.

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