Fouettés, Flutters and Fun: The Trocks at 50

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. (Photo: Zoran Jelenic.)

On Sunday, Oct. 19, at the Elgin & Winter Garden Theatres, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo — the Trocks — closed their 50th-anniversary tour in Toronto with an evening in which exacting technique and theatrical excess sharpened one another — and the laughter felt earned. From the first moment, it was clear the Trocks were performing with both intelligence and irreverence.

The program opened with the company’s signature Swan Lake, a study in the productive tension between precision and exaggeration. Swans carved clean diagonals and landed fouettés with clarity, then tipped into choreographed missteps that provoked genuine laughter without undermining the dancers’ craft. This is the Trocks’ hallmark: their comedy rests on virtuosity. Each fouetté and arabesque maintained its classical integrity even as it was nudged toward comic effect, demonstrating that parody, at its best, honours tradition by making its formal rules — and the discipline behind them — newly visible.

The Trocks’ reimagining of Mikhail Fokine’s The Dying Swan deployed self-aware theatricality not to undermine the solo’s pathos, but to deconstruct it. As the dancer’s fluttering movements sent a shower of feathers falling from the tutu, the performance became at once poignant and absurd, creating a critical distance that laid bare the mechanics of its own melodrama. This humour acted as a scalpel, dissecting the artifice of representing death through an aestheticized, avian cipher and interrogating the space between biological cessation and its balletic transfiguration.

Their take on Joseph Mazilier’s Paquita fused bravura with theatricality. A high jump was extended into a defiant hover; a series of pirouettes threatened to spin comically off-axis, only to resolve with impeccable control. The audience’s laughter was not a distraction but an appreciative response. Here, the Trocks achieved their synthesis: technical prowess, delivered with knowing wit, needed no solemnity to command respect. Comedy, in this register, acts as a lens that highlights technique rather than erases it.

The program’s most unexpected highlight was an excerpt from Seán Curran’s Metal Garden, a contemporary work that stripped away the familiar scaffolding of classical narrative and made the Trocks’ methodology clearest. The movement vocabulary — a series of sharp, robotic yet smooth isolations and playful, almost insect-like group formations — was executed with exactitude. Without the immediate cue of a famous score, their signature wink was distilled into the choreography itself: a perfectly synchronized head tilt; a sudden, collective freeze. This excerpt made clear that the Trocks’ practice is not simply about parodying ballet but about applying a precise, critical intelligence to movement. Metal Garden confirmed that their comedy stems from a deep understanding of form, whether they are embellishing a 19th-century classic or animating a contemporary metallic landscape.

Gender play is integral to the Trocks’ method. By having an all-male company perform both female and male roles, the company exposes how stage femininity is constructed: stylized, learned, repeatable. The exaggerations are affectionate and attentive, never cruel. Through drag and camp sensibility, the company teases apart assumptions about elegance and beauty — inviting audiences to see those categories as contingent and constructed.

The anniversary program read less like nostalgia than like a carefully argued dossier. By pairing excerpts from Paquita and Swan Lake with contemporary work, the company treated its repertoire as a living archive: familiar peaks were reframed to reveal structural choices. That curatorial economy — small shifts in timing, emphasis and inflection — kept the material feeling freshly observed rather than merely recycled.

What makes the Trocks resilient is the fusion of virtuosity and theatrical intelligence. Fouettés, épaulement and controlled elevation remain exacting; they are calibrated so that technical feats register as comic punctuation rather than easy targets. In this register, skill becomes evidence — every gag lands because the craft behind it is indisputable.

By curtain call, the evening had outgrown its premise of amusement. Parody emerged as a mode of attention: by teasing the form apart, the company made visible what we ordinarily take for granted as elegance. After half a century, the Trocks showed that sustaining a classical practice is less about preservation than about persistent interrogation — disciplined, inventive and unflinchingly theatrical. 

– Jason Wang is a writer and cultural critic based in Toronto. He is the co-editor of Creative Resilience and COVID-19: Figuring the Everyday in a Pandemic (Routledge) and has contributed to Toronto Life, The Conversation, and the Literary Review of Canada. He holds a PhD in Communication and Culture from York University.