3 hours ago
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Depending on how you look at it, drag ballet troupe the Trocks offer either lighthearted camp, an in-joke for dance megafans, or an existential question about the very nature of ballet and beauty. Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, to give the company its formal mouthful of a name, has been going since 1974, five decades in which the perception of drag, and of gender, has transformed. The 14-strong all-male company (or gender-skewering, they now usually say) dresses in tutus, pointe shoes and greasepaint, dancing mainly extracts from the classical ballet repertoire: Swan Lake, Paquita, etc.
They do it in a way that mixes slapstick comedy, hammed up to the hilt, with a deep love and knowledge of the art form. It is both broad and subtle, a bathetic tightrope act that apes and satirises the ideal of the ballerina; it mocks ballet tropes while also pulling off fouettés and arabesques and allegro pointe work. The technical feats are somehow more impressive because these aren’t otherworldly ballerinas but an assortment of bodies that feel real, imperfections and all. It’s a reminder how hard this stuff is, and that the drive to do it is really exceptional; we’re rooting for them.
But what is perfection anyway? Why is one body “right” for ballet and another not? Why is one particular angle or proportion deemed pleasing? How much is “innate” beauty versus cultural convention? The fabulous Takaomi Yoshino, a technical whiz, may come closest to a classic ballerina figure, but one of the tallest, least traditionally “feminine” dancers, Andrea Fabbri, in cat’s-eye glasses with his tutu, moves with such elan it’s an absolute pleasure to watch.
The Trocks also do new work. Séan Curran’s Metal Garden is a contemporary ballet parody in Lycra and curly wigs that’s effortlessly amusing – whether you know about dance or not, we can all recognise visual patterns and social cues and laugh when they’re played with. But it also has me musing on why we even watch dance and what qualities we might be looking for; and what weird things humans dedicate themselves to, derive pleasure from and read meaning into. It’s all very simple, and very sophisticated. That’s why the Trocks have been going so long. It works as pantomime, and also so much more.
