Sadler’s Wells, London
Men in tutus and pointe shoes loving and parodying their art form never ages; it’s both simple and very sophisticated
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.
