Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo (photo: Sascha Vaughn via The Broadway Blog.)
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, “The Dying Swan” (photo: Sascha Vaughn via The Broadway Blog.)
Sure, you could see The Nutcracker or Radio City Christmas Spectacular again. But why not shake up your holiday theater experience with the Trocks? The Joyce Theater Foundation welcomes back Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo for its biennial three-week holiday engagement, this year from December 16, 2014 – January 6, 2015. The season will feature two different programs including some of the troupe’s most popular works, plus the New York premiere of excerpts from La Naïade et Le Pêcheur, based on the original staging by Pyotr Gusev.
The internationally adored Trocks, the all-male troupe who risk comfort for astonishing pointe work, blend tribute with raucous send-up as they tread lightly through the vast classics of ballet. For its 40th anniversary year, the Company will bring down the house (and, at the same time, likely raise the roof) with two programs including the New York premiere of excerpts from the delightful La Naïade et Le Pêcheur, revived by The Trocks more than 170 years after its 1843 world premiere in London. Also on tap will be some of the Company’s most beloved productions, such as Go For Barocco, ChopEniana, Don Quixote and Swan Lake, as well as Patterns in Space, a wonderful parody featuring choreography inspired by Merce Cunningham. See these works, and more, performed by the primo ballerinas that have made this beloved troupe the foremost all-male comic ballet company in the world.
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo
Joyce Theater
175 8th Avenue (at 19th Street)
Want to learn more about the Trocks? Take the jump…
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, “Valpurgeyeva Noch” (photo: Walpurgisnacht via The Broadway Blog.)
Celebrating its 40th Anniversary season, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo was founded in 1974 by a group of ballet enthusiasts for the purpose of presenting a playful, entertaining view of traditional, classical ballet in parody form and en travesti, Les Ballets Trockadero first performed in the late-late shows in Off-Off Broadway lofts. The Trocks, as they are affectionately known, quickly garnered a major critical essay by Arlene Croce in The New Yorker, which combined with reviews in The New York Times and The Village Voice, established the Company as an artistic and popular success. By mid 1975, The Trocks’ inspired blend of their loving knowledge of dance, their comic approach, and the astounding fact that men can, indeed, dance en pointe without falling flat on their faces, was being noted beyond New York. Articles and notices in publications such as Variety, Oui, The London Daily Telegraph, as well as a Richard Avedon photo essay in Vogue, made the Company nationally and internationally known.
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, “Black Swan” (photo: Sascha Vaughn via The Broadway Blog.)
The 1975-76 season was a year of growth and full professionalization. The Company found management, qualified for the National Endowment for the Arts Touring Program, and hired a full-time teacher and ballet mistress to oversee daily classes and rehearsals. Also in this season, they made their first extended tours of the United States and Canada. Packing, unpacking, and repacking tutus and drops, stocking giant sized toe shoes by the case; running for planes and chartered buses all became routine parts of life.
Since those beginnings, the Trocks have established themselves as a major dance phenomenon throughout the world. They have participated in some of the most renowned international dance festivals and have appeared on various TV specials in the U.S. and abroad.
The Trocks’ numerous tours have been both popular and critical successes—their frenzied annual schedule has included ten tours to Australia and New Zealand, twenty eight to Japan (where their annual summer tours have created a nation-wide cult following and a fan club), nine to other parts of Asia, twelve to South America, three to South Africa, and 76 tours of Europe, including 21 tours of the United Kingdom. In the United States, the Company has become a regular part of the college and university circuit in addition to regular dance presentations in cities in 49 states. The Company has appeared in over 34 countries and over 600 cities worldwide since its founding in 1974.
The original concept of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo has not changed. It is a Company of professional male dancers performing the full range of the ballet and modern dance repertoire, including classical and original works in faithful renditions of the manners and conceits of those dance styles. The fact that men dance all the parts–heavy bodies delicately balancing on toes as swans, sylphs, water sprites, romantic princesses, angst-ridden Victorian ladies–enhances rather than mocks the spirit of dance as an art form, delighting and amusing the most knowledgeable, as well as novices, in the audiences. For the future, there are plans for new works in the repertoire: new cities, states and countries to perform in; and for the continuation of The Trocks’ original purpose: to bring the pleasure of dance to the widest possible audience. They will, as they have done for forty years, “Keep on Trockin’.”
