Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo were popular regulars at Washington’s Kennedy Center until Trump’s demented blast against decadent queerness. In truth the company is simply blameless pantomime, innocent fun for all the family.
Based in the USA and clocking up 50 years tirelessly on the road, it consists of male dancers in drag gently parodying an art form deeply encoded in elaborate conventions that are ripe for mockery. The Trocks, as they are affectionately known, also draw on a now-forgotten phenomenon: the hand-to-mouth touring companies of the postwar years that themselves traded off the model of Diaghilev’s great enterprise. These died out at least half a century ago, but they inspired various lingering stereotypes that the Trocks still exploit – among them the notion that ballet dancers have idiotic Russian names and are very rivalrous, bad-tempered and up themselves.
The humour that ensues as they perform edited versions of classic repertory is largely a matter of crude visual gags revolving round pratfalls, costume malfunctions, manoeuvres that come close to collapse, nervous neophytes who turn left when they should have turned right, exits or entrances mistimed, all accompanied by cartoon goofy facial expressions. There are many people who find this sort of thing funny.
These dancers, all academically trained, nurse a not very dirty little secret
But the farce runs only skin deep. One even feels that such elements might have been pasted in solely to please audiences, because what soon emerges is that these dancers, all academically trained, nurse a not very dirty little secret: they would much rather be authentically artistic ballerinas, doing this thing properly. It’s just that their bodies, damn it, won’t ever let it happen.
Some of them have powerful techniques and, occasionally, one of them pulls off something distinctly impressive – Maya Thickenthighya’s sharply executed set of fouettés in the pas de deux from Le Corsaire, for example, or Varvara Laptopova’s finely held balance en attitude in the Paquita divertissement. But in the second act of Swan Lake their efforts are merely poignantly mediocre – for all their flapping and fluttering, their musculature simply didn’t destine them to be enchanted swans. I couldn’t tell what contemporary choreography a newly commissioned piece entitled ‘Metal Garden’ was specifically intended to mock but it made little impact. More enthusiastically received was a jolly dig during the curtain calls at Michael Flatley’s Riverdance.
A moribund relic of a camp culture that predates more radical debunking of gender roles, the Trocks’ shtick is getting tired now, but they continue to be very popular in Britain and will be travelling nationwide until the end of June. I wish them well.
Far closer to the heart of their matter is the practice of Kadeem Hosein, a willowy young British man of Caribbean descent, whose work can be seen on his website Kadeemenpointe.com and You Tube.
Kadeem lives out a fantasy that most of us would blushingly keep private
He is not a drag queen and he doesn’t gurn or tease: he dances as himself, usually bare-chested, sometimes wearing cut-off jeans and sneakers, sometimes in tutu and pointe shoes, as he performs to the best of his ability (which is considerable, if not of professional standard) the most recognisable female solos of classical ballet – Sugar Plum Fairy, Dying Swan, and so on.
As the Joni Mitchell song has it, he does this ‘real good, for free’, without irony, apology or advertisement, en plein air, busking in prominent public places and piazzas around Britain (and occasionally abroad), recording his efforts on video before passers-by who are variously impressed, curious, baffled, indifferent, amused, or enthusiastic. Kadeem is marvellously fearless, joyful and uninhibited, living out a fantasy that most of us would blushingly keep private. In defiance of every snigger and stigma, he dances for the sheer love of it with an honesty that makes the Trocks look coy and jejune.
Comments