The ballerinas of Les Ballets Trocadero de Monte Carlo never change. With the never-say-die showbiz spirit of a faded Russian touring company, and a whiff of greasepaint and glamour, Ida Nevasayneva, Maya Thickenthighya and the other ballet warriors are eternally giving heroic performances, triumphantly knocking off a technical trick or two, flirting with the audience, elbowing rivals out of the way.
When the Trocks, as they are known, gave their first performances in a downtown New York loft in 1974, the men who put the show together didn’t imagine their group would outlast the two-weekend run. Fifty years later, the company — an all-male comic ensemble whose dancers play both the ballerinas and the princes — is a beloved and applauded institution that has survived the AIDS epidemic; seen gay marriage become legal and the advent of transgender rights; and somehow never changed its identity.
Beginning Tuesday, the company celebrates its 50th anniversary season with two programs at the Joyce Theater, featuring versions of “Swan Lake,” “Giselle” and “Raymonda,” among other pieces.
Linda Shelton, the Joyce’s executive director, said that the first time the company performed at the Joyce, in 1997: “We took a photo outside the theater with me standing amid the dancers in full costume and makeup. Taxi cabs were almost crashing into each other!”
New York taxi drivers probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid at the sight of men in tutus these days, but Tory Dobrin, the company’s artistic director, said they were never interested in shocking anyone or making a political statement. “Our point of view has always been: We are men doing performances of ballet in drag for comedic purposes,” he said.
Some of the company’s early members recently talked about their memories and the changes that the company has experienced — or, more pointedly — ignored.
A Founder
In 1974, Peter Anastos joined a few friends performing with the Trocadero Gloxinia Ballet, a drag troupe that, he said, “knew nothing about ballet but liked dressing up in tutus.” Anastos, a balletomane with some teenage training (“I was really terrible”) proposed they choreograph “a real ballet.” Anastos — and others from Gloxinia — were promptly fired, and they formed Les Ballets Trocadero de Monte Carlo (a homage to the Ballets Russes spinoff companies that toured Europe in the 1930s and 1940s).
“We didn’t really know what we were doing, just having fun,” Anastos said. But, he added, “We were passionate balletomanes, and we only hired people with ballet training.” Every dancer was given a female and male persona.
It was the height of the dance boom in New York City, and the group began to gain a following. Mikhail Baryshnikov, the new superstar ballet dancer in town, turned up, and laughed so much he fell off his chair into the aisle. Stravinsky’s widow, Vera, saw a show and informed them “we used to do this in St Petersburg before the revolution.”
Until he left in 1979, Anastos ran the company alongside Natch Taylor and Anthony Bassae. “We had a Black ballerina right off the bat,” Anastos said, referring to Bassae. “It never occurred to us this was groundbreaking,” he said, alluding to the continuing scarcity of Black women in mainstream companies.
An important ingredient in the Trocks’ early success, Anastos said, was their focus on sending up important choreographers like Marius Petipa, George Balanchine and Martha Graham. “A guy in a tutu is only funny for about five minutes; it was so much about the choreography and punching holes in the sacred cows. We did it lovingly and with a great sense of history.”
The Director
Dobrin joined the Trocks in 1980. “I was the English ballerina, Margaret Lowin-Octeyn, and my biography said ‘long a pillar of Stonehenge Ballet,’” he said with a laugh. “I patterned her on Margaret Thatcher.”
The atmosphere of the company at the time “wasn’t great,” Dobrin said. “The National Endowment for the Arts was really conservative, and the management wanted us to play the straight and narrow. Then AIDS hit; it was devastating for the gay community and affected the company horribly. I think we are still scarred by it today.”
By the early 1990s, Dobrin said, the company “really loosened up and was much funnier — because why not?” The troupe began to tour extensively to Japan, “which really saved us,” Dobrin said. “They demanded really good dancing and our sense of humor just aligned with audiences there.”
The critics in New York mostly “didn’t like us,” he said. “But when we went to London in 1998, we got wonderful reviews; they treated us with a lot of respect and that really changed things in the U.S.” By the early 2000s the company was far more widely known and had started to attract international and better dancers. The improved quality meant “we could be more free with the comedy,” Dobrin said.
The other major change in the last decades, he said, is in the public, which has expanded to “just about everyone, including a lot of children; that would have been seen as totally unsuitable in the ’80s.”
Dobrin said that the recent focus on drag queens — the criticisms of drag queen story hours and attempts in some states to shut down or police drag shows — was concerning. But for the most part, changes in social and gender politics had been positive.
“The younger generation is super comfortable with being on pointe, in drag, and being gay,” he said. “But essentially we are doing theater drag, not female impersonation like you might find in a club. We are creating characters. At least that’s our intent.”
Dancers
Paul Ghiselen (Ida Nevasayneva) and Robert Carter (Olga Supphozova) joined the Trocks in the mid-1990s, when the company was starting to hit its stride at home and internationally. “They were demanding more from the dancers, bringing in coaches and new ballet masters,” said Ghiselen, who retired in 2017. “It wasn’t just a bunch of guys floundering around.”
Dobrin started to program more demanding ballets, Carter said, citing the “Paquita” divertissement, “Le Corsaire” and Anastos’s “Go for Barocco,” a spoof on Balanchine’s “Concerto Barocco.” He also hired Elena Kunikova, a Russian ballet mistress with whom he collaborated on stagings of Russian classics like “The Little Humpbacked Horse” and “Laurencia,” rarely seen in the West.
These works, Joan Acocella wrote in The New Yorker in 2005, are “essays not just on ballet but on ballet culture, the customs and legends that have collected around the art.”
“The technical level has improved enormously,” Ghiselen said. “Before you were just happy that there were dancers! Now, it’s a career move with people from all over the world who could dance in the best companies and often have.”
The Trocks, he added, may not have had a political agenda, but “they have helped change peoples’s perspectives on drag.”
Carter agreed. “When we started, it was an adult crowd who came to see us,” he said. “The audience is much more broad now; we have little old ladies bringing their grandchildren.” The shows, he added, “are good for everyone: ballet lovers, ballet haters! Because basically people like to laugh.”
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