The Trocks, as they are affectionately known, are back in town. It’s time to tutu.
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo is an all-male company and they have been burlesquing classical dance traditions for close on 50 years.
The humour is aimed at those who know ballet and appreciate subtle jokes and those who know nothing about ballet and enjoy broad slapstick.
The surprise of Swan Lake Act II, the company’s signature work, is how much of it is serious. The Trocks are excellent dancers. They play both female and male roles, and change their stage names accordingly. Their spoof CVs in the printed programme are an amusing read.
The joke in the Swan Lake Pas de Trois is the mismatch. The male dancer is exceptionally small. The ballerinas are exceptionally tall. It is they who have to lift him rather than the other way round.
Nightcrawlers, a moody, nocturnal piece, danced by three couples in evening dress, who flirt and quarrel to Chopin’s music, is Peter Anastos’s parody of Jerome Robbins.
The Trocks’s hilarious spoof of The Dying Swan is as Fokine famous as the version created for Pavlova. Robert Carter’s swan moults and moults and moults.
Walpurgisnacht, the exuberant ballet in the last act of Gounod’s opera Faust, is often danced on its own. Elen Kunikova’s staging is based on Leonid Lavrovsky’s choreography which is generally dismissed as Soviet Balletic Camp. The semi-naked horned fauns, nymphs and maidens, headed by Pan, enjoy a pagan frolic rather than a bacchanalian orgy.
The final curtain, with the company performing a classic Broadway chorus line high kicking routine, is a fun way to finish this enjoyable show.
Following their season in London, The Trocks will visit Canterbury, Brighton, Norwich, Nottingham, Buxton, Hull, Bradford, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Truro and Belfast. You can find out more by following this link.
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