Les Ballets Trockaderos de Monte Carlo sports one of those mischievous, tongue-twisting monikers that you might associate with a picaresque dance company.
You would be right to do that.
The Trocks, as fans affectionately call them, got their start in off-off-Broadway spaces in New York. Some 34 years later, the company has played thousands of shows from its hometown to the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.
The company returns to Colorado for a quartet of shows in Boulder, Denver, Fort Collins and Beaver Creek through Tuesday.
The conceit: Its all-male members dance on point, en travesti, ramping up the delicateness of classical ballet and bringing into relief the artificiality of gender.
“When you’re dealing with these kinds of issues you’re really just dealing in stereotypes,” said artistic director Tory Dobrin. “We take those super-conventions, these behaviors, and make them very exaggerated.”
The company transcends its gimmick by employing talent that knows the craft well enough to break the rules. The 15 dancers perform selections from “Swan Lake,” “Majismas” and others.
Balancing playfulness and parody with discipline and reverence is key to the shows’ success, Dobrin said.
“The dancers are all super funny. When they’re given these roles it’s really not to change the choreography, but to create the comedy within their roles,” he said. “All the steps are the same but different within each characterization.”
Reviews are glowing.
“The gags work every time because they are rooted in a love affair with ballet,” wrote Judith Mackrell in The Guardian in 2006. “Whether the Trocks are camping up the flashy self-marketing techniques of prima ballerinas, or the agonies of their put-upon princes, they do it with an accuracy born of passion.”
That passion is what has sustained the company for so long, said Bud Coleman, chairman of the Department of Theatre & Dance at the University of Colorado.
“The comedy appeals on many levels simultaneously,” he said. “If you know the ballet inside and out you can get all the layers of humor. But if you’ve never seen that particular ballet, or even been to a dance concert, you still don’t feel like you’re left out of the joke.”
Coleman should know: He not only danced with the Trocks for eight months, but he also wrote his 1993 academic dissertation on the group.
The Trocks have performed in 500 cities in 33 countries, “from South Africa to Siberia,” as artistic director Dobrin puts it.
Dobrin, who joined the company in 1980 as a dancer, cites the Trocks’ artistic diversity as one reason for their longevity.
“There are lots of different kinds of comedy in the company, from real rough physical stuff to vaudevillian gags to high-class comments on choreography,” he said. “We have such a wide net.”
John Wenzel: 303-954-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com
