Founded in 1974, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo has long made its name as an all-male comic ballet troupe. On the company’s 50th anniversary UK tour, the formula still delivers an evening of easy pleasure and frequent laughter.
The evening opens with Le Lac des Cygnes. A prop swan is dragged across the stage by Benno, played by Jacque d’Aniels (Antonio Lopez), in a moment of broad visual absurdity that even reminds me of Tom and Jerry, immediately setting the tone of exaggeration and deliberate misbehaviour. The famous Dance of the Cygnets perhaps best captures the company’s overall style, silly, clumsy and slightly farcical. Prince Siegfried (Araf Legupski/Andrea Fabbri) showcases his mock-heroic posing with inflated self-importance, delivered in deliberate pretentiousness. After the first interval comes Le Corsaire, where the piece becomes more theatrical. Here, the duet Maya Thickenthighya (Peter Gwiazada) and Mikhail Mudkin (Raydel Caceres) allows some virtuosity, including some decent multiple pirouettes from Gwiazada.
Their original piece Metal Garden might be the least successful of the night. Supposed to be a mockery of contemporary dance, it comes across as perplexing and confusing. To parody contemporary dance, both the choreographer and the dancers need thorough understanding and foregrounded experience before pulling it apart. It is obviously not the case here, so the joke fails to bite. The soundscape suffers from a similar uncertainty. It seems to be making fun, but ends up in the middle of nowhere. The second part closes with the famous Dying Swan, with endless dropping feathers and a spotlight desperately chasing across an empty stage.
The true gem of the evening is Varvara Laptopova (Takaomi Yoshino), the ballerina in Paquita. Yoshino dances with grace, lightness and gentleness, a true ballerina. Within a programme built largely on semi-comic distortion, his dancing possesses something finally serious. But the comedy is still there when Caceres fails to lift Yoshino and is ordered to do press-ups. Yoshino’s presence makes the joke even more anchored by his genuine elegance.
Overall, it is certainly a lovely and enjoyable evening, which you can tell from the auditorium’s knowing laughter. However, I could not quite stop thinking about the point of an ‘all-male comedy ballet company’ 50 years after its founding. While most of the dancers have proper ballet training, as ballerinas their skills are not of a sufficiently high standard to create genuine comedy.
There is also a hidden gendered gap. Female ballerinas often undergo unimaginable technical and bodily discipline to appear effortless onstage, and are still scrutinised mercilessly for their bodies, lines, strength, softness and expressive quality. Here, by contrast, male dancers can offer a deliberately imperfect version of ballerina technique and have that imperfection received as charm, comedy and even liberation.
Comedy should feel more persuasive when supported by real technique, as in Yoshino’s case, rather than simply a marketing strategy or a convenient cover for half-quality ballet. The question, really, is no longer simply whether men in tutus can be funny. Of course they can. The more vital question here is whether, after 50 years, the joke still cuts deeply enough.
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