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The cast of Swan Lake Act II Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo
Birmingham Hippodrome
**** ANY visit by the Trocks, or to give them
their Sunday best name, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, is always
a delight. For those who have yet to come across them they
are a ballet company like no other; talented, meticulous, accomplished,
clever and wonderfully funny. If you like ballet you will love them,
recognising all the ballet jokes and the send-ups of all its
affectations and foibles and, if you think ballet is . . . well a
load of tutus and blokes poncing about then you won’t be disappointed
either. There are loads of tutus – and blokes wearing
them poncing about with great skill and superb execution for this is
ballet in drag, so to speak. Formed in 1974 in New York’s off-Broadway lofts,
the company produces some wonderful parodies of classical and romantic
ballet in the Russian style – right down to foot positions, which is
where meticulous comes in. It might be done for laughs, but it is
authentic laughs. Most of the company are American but being
Russian, sort of – Laszlo Major, one of the company is from Hungary
which isn’t far away after all – gives plenty of scope
for names such as Tatiana Youbetyoubootskaya who dances Odette, and was
really danced by Philip Martin Nielson from New York and a graduate of
the prestigious School of American Ballet.
The men as men are what you would expect from any
top class ballet company and as women the make-up is quite exquisite –
although hairy chests are still a bit of a giveaway. Even so it is still strange to see a man who
looks as if he would be at home on a rugby field in a tutu, en pointe
and, when not clowning, dancing Odette with admirable technique. For an
experienced ballet dancer to learn to dance en point is not a huge step,
I am told, but it is still a strange sight. One of the numerous Leguspski brothers,
Vyacheslav Legupski, danced by Italian Paolo Cervellera, took on the
role of Prince Siegfried while Innokenti Smoktumuchsky (you get the idea
on names), danced by Cuban Carlos Hopuy, was the diminutive Benno taking
on the challenge of lifting the somewhat less diminutive Odette – we’ll
call that one a draw. Another Italian Raffael
Morra was the red haired dervish of Von Rothbart in a moving finale to
Swan Lake,
killing off he Prince just like that,
it was a finale which had given us an eight strong corps and four
cygnets along with a few mishaps along the way. High kicks can be so
dangerous. Patterns in Space
eschewed classical ballet for once and took us instead to the world of
contemporary dance with a wicked parody of the late Merce Cunningham’s
work. While dancers Laszlo Major, Alberto Pretto and Jack Fulong Jr performed to music from Raffaele Mora and Paolo Cervellera who played everything from paper bags to Kazoos, gargled and made animal noises in a tuneless performance which the programme tells us is after John Cage . . .. another playful parody. The music is connected to the dancing only by
being on the same stage while the dancers moved around with little
purpose other than moving – and it was very funny. Go for Barocco
gave is an ensemble piece which shows what can go wrong when dancer hold
hands and weave in and out and to close act two Raffaela Morra performed
what has become a Trock signature piece, the
Dying Swan –
a very emotional piece, all en pointe and with lots of feathers. Proving that this is
not just a comedy act, the Trocks really can dance - Trocks have left to
dance as principals in straight ballet companies – the final act sees
Don Quixote,
or rather it doesn’t as he and Sancho have been dropped for budgetary
reasons so you are asked to imagine them. The scene at the inn sees Carlos Hopuy, Benno
from Swan Lake undergo a sex change to re-emerge as Kitri, the
innkeeper’s daughter, while Laszlo Major is the poor barber she has
fallen for. This is largely danced straight, for the Trocks
at any rate, expanding on the humour inbuilt in the 1900 Alexander
Gorsky production of the Petipa/Minkus ballet in the Bolshoi Theatre of
Moscow. You soon forget Hopuy is a bloke in a tutu and
his pas de deux with Major is of the highest order. There are the odd
extra laughs added, but this is party piece time with solos that would
have brought rapturous applause had we been watching BRB rather than the
Trocks. Around them we have flamboyant gypsies, Raffaele
Morra, again, as the very Widow Simone mother and Robert Carter as the
old crone who turns into the fairy Amour. To make ballet funny beyond a comedy sketch you
have to be able to do it well in the first place and the Trocks go
through the same punishing regimen of classes, sprains, ice baths,
blisters, bleeding feet, blackened nails as any other professional
ballet company. At the end the 15 strong company lined up and as
an encore gave us a snatch of Riverdance – look mum, no hands. To
11-11-15 Roger Clarke
10-11-15
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