A Bad Case Of The Trocks

Richard Watts gets behind the tulle and tutus of male ballet troupe The Trocks to discover what makes the company tick.


Tory Dobrin has worked with the drag ballet troupe Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo since 1980, first as a dancer, and since 1994 as the company’s Artistic Director. He attributes his longevity with ‘the Trocks’, as the company are generally known, to a love for ballet that borders on the obsessive.

"I - and indeed all of the dancers too - really love classical ballet," he says. "It’s the sort of love that can be a really obsessive thing. We have fun with that obsession, so it makes for a good time. We’ve found the thing that we really love and we pursue it. It just happens to have a particular kind of twist."

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo formed in 1974, and over the intervening decades has grown into a company adored by gay man and hardcore ballet aficionados alike for their sly juxtaposition of camp humour and a mastery of classical ballet. Although their origins lie in the explosion of politically oriented drag theatre that appeared in the USA in the years immediately after Stonewall, Dobrin explains that the Trocks no longer see themselves as a specifically gay dance troupe.

"It’s not a gay company per se because we don’t really address gay issues; gay issues being marriage and adoption, at least those are the big gay issues in America. We do address gender issues though, because we deal with heightened stereotypes, but there is certainly a lot of gay sensibility in what we do."

That sensibility is at the heart of the Trocks’ performances, which spoof and satirise the conventions of traditional ballet and reduce their audiences to helpless laughter. A company of larger than life ballerinas pout, preen, pirouette and dance en pointe through a succession of exaggerated classical ballet routines, but beneath the comedy there is real artistry at work, and a real love for the formal conventions of the genre that the Trocks are spoofing.

"We usually bring in choreographers so that we can accurately stage traditional Russian ballet classics," Dobrin says of the process by which they bring such ballets to life. "Then after we set the piece, we start trying to work around it to find out where we can bring out the comedy. That’s usually a long process which all of the dancers participate in."

It is thanks to this process of participation that the dancers of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo have successfully maintained their enthusiasm, as well as their devoted international audiences, Dobrin believes.

"It’s a new generation of dancers, and they’re also comedians, so there’s always an infusion of fresh energy which is nurtured, not squashed. That maintains our ability to come up with new material all the time. If all the same people who started out in 1974 were still in the company it would be deadly boring by now," he laughs.

The Trocks perform at the Arts Centre State Theatre from 27 October - 5 November. Bookings on www.ticketmaster.com.au or 1300 136 166.

This article originally appeared in MCV #250, Fri 14 Oct 2005.