Never has the adage “if it’s not broken, then don’t fix it” been more true than for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo (affectionately known as The Trocks), which has been touring the world for the past 52 years like the drag ballet equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters. With a little artistic licence, this programme kicks off the 50th Anniversary UK Tour, which takes in twelve more venues in England, Scotland and Wales between now and late June, organised under the auspices of Dance Consortium.
Pre-television, comedians would go on a similar grand tour, essentially with the same act and by the time they came back to a venue, they could tell the same jokes since they wouldn’t be remembered. The Trocks don’t exactly tell the same jokes, although there is plenty of comedy and the pastiches of Swan Lake and The Dying Swan have remained unchanged, but they stick to the same tried and tested formula, and why not, since audience reactions clearly show that it works.
The company seems to have slimmed down from the usual 16 dancers, to 14 for this tour, or should it be 28, since every dancer performs in alter egos as both a male danseur and a glamorous ballerina, often with a hirsute chest! It is wrong to regard the Trocks as simply a troupe of men dancing as women: drag ballet is a huge element in what they do, but they are purveyors of a unique genre of dance comedy, ranging from slapstick to intellectual parody, and they can certainly dance well. We witnessed multiple beautifully observed Italian fouettés and the pointe work was fastidious.
The formulaic structure of every show begins with a deadpan announcement as to the absence of certain “ballerinas”, invariably spoken slowly by someone who is not fluent in English. The company’s mysterious prima ballerina, Natasha Notgoodenuff, seems now to have left permanently to dance with the Grandes Imperial Ballets de Croydon!
As at the beginning, so at the end, the group always encores the curtain call with a brief danced cameo. On this occasion – perhaps in deference to the recent performances in Dublin – it was a revival of the po-faced facsimile of Irish dancing in a fog of dry ice!
Between these bookends there will always be a ‘white’ ballet; a divertissement that is a ‘late addition’; the ubiquitous Dying Swan; a modern ballet; and a final one-act classical ballet that is danced with less parody, although exaggerated expressions and balletic positions are still in evidence.
Another aspect that has survived over many years is the humorous naming of those alter egos. The company is much changed since the last visit to the UK, but names carry on: thus we still have the redoubtable Minnie Van Driver, although ‘she’ is now played by Liam Hutt and not Trystan Merrick or Joseph Jefferies.
This programme opened with Le Lac des cygnes, which now has the well-polished patina layered through many hundreds, if not thousands, of performances. All the much-loved farce was there, such as the corps dancer ridiculously out-of-place and desperate to be noticed, the ill-matched cygnet foursome, the hopelessly inept Benno (here played by Antonio Lopez as Jacques d’Aniels) and the villainous von Rothbart – the long-serving Robert Carter in his male guise as Yuri Smirnov. Andrea Fabri’s Araf Legupski was a deliberately wooden Prince Siegfried and Colette Adai (Jake Speakman) was an absurdly muscular, yet surprisingly elegant Odette.
The ‘surprise’ divertissement was Le Corsaire pas de deux danced by Maya Thickenthighya (another recycled name now owned by Peter Gwiazda) and Raydel Caceres (as Mikhail Mudkin, resonant of Mordkin, a great early 20th century dancer from the Bolshoi Ballet). As always, the comedy stemmed from the contrast of the demure-looking guy dancing with the imposing ballerina!
The hilarious new addition (from 2024) was Metal Garden, a wonderfully observed robotic pastiche of modern dance, which was followed by the compulsory performance of The Dying Swan, danced by Carter’s Olga Supphozova. His first performance of the croaking swan was in the 1990s and so I’m guessing that he may lay claim (perhaps even more so than Maya Plisetskaya) to have danced it more than anyone else. The familiar ingredients were all there, the spotlight failing to find the swan’s entrance, moulting feathers, the ‘chicken walk’, and milking the applause at the curtain call. Carter/Supphozova has been playing the part for so long that I expect he/she could perform it in his/her sleep. It never fails to send the audience into the interval with a smile.
The final section was an extract from Paquita, with an exceptional performance in the lead ballerina role by Takaomi Yoshino (as Varvara Laptopova), rattling off more fouettés than I could count, ably supported by the return of Caceres as Mudkin. Of course, this wasn’t the end since we then had the exuberant ‘River Dance’ finale!
