Toe frolic

The Trockaderos' hilarious travesty

by Marcia B. Siegel

One source of the Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo's appeal -- for both audience and performers -- is its capacity for innocent pleasure. Grown men in this culture are supposed to take their fun as a serious matter, preferably with a tennis racket or a weapon in hand. But the dancers of the Trockadero grab at the movement with the eagerness of a bunch of preteens.

Travesty, or cross-dressing, in current lingo, is a form of disguise, something that allows you to escape the conventions of your time and place as well as your gender. So it can be a source of comedy and commentary, not just titillation. Most contemporary drag is political, providing a platform for asserting identities and demanding the expansion of social boundaries. But the Trocks have been around for a quarter of a century; their revolution has become almost a trend.

Last Friday's BankBoston Celebrity Series presentation at the Emerson Majestic began with the expected: an over-the-top satire on act two of Swan Lake. There was a barrel-chested Odette the Swan Queen (Margeaux Mundeyn), a simple-minded Prince (Mikolojus Vatissnyem), and a hard-working Rothbart (Velour Pilleaux) who resorted to hauling off his victims by force when his magic failed to work. The corps de ballet, with hairy armpits and costumes that needed laundering, embellished the traditional steps in their separate ways. The Prince's valet, Benno (The Artist Formerly Known As Prince Myshkin), made a comeback, demonstrating why he has been obsolete for half a century as a lifter and carrier of the ballerina. Not that Pilleaux was any better at it.

Toward the tragic end of the act, Mme. Mundeyn and Pilleaux managed to dance quite a number of the original steps of their variations, but not without lengthy build-ups and false starts. This production chose the "unhappy"-ending option. Rothbart dragged Odette off to his castle. The Prince fainted. But Benno, after snapping his picture, stayed to console him.

In a sense, this kind of parody is old stuff that never loses its laugh. But when the Trocks get into their stride and the audience has dealt with the transgender imagery, the takeoffs get subtler and wittier. Peter Anastos was one of the founders of the Trockadero. He became established in the straight ballet world as a choreographer and company director long ago, but his nom de guerre, Olga Tchikaboumskaya, is still being dropped as a token of the company's past glories. His Go for Barocco has been in the repertory since the '70s. It's a fond and funny tribute to George Balanchine, based on Concerto Barocco but with wisps of Serenade, Four Temperaments, Apollo and a few other Balanchine icons trailing from its fingertips.

Nadia Rombova and Iona Trailer are the principal ballerinas, supported by a relatively well-behaved corps of six dancers. The ballet is about dancing, and the ensemble dances so well that the jokes are only an added dividend. The arabesques get higher and more wavering the more they repeat; the daisy chains look charming before they turn into knots; the tricky coordinations of arm gestures with hops on point and the traveling pas de chats in nearly perfect line-ups are exhilarating; the precision power-walk exits seem perfectly logical.

We hardly ever get to see Merce Cunningham's work here, so it was great to have Cross Currents on this program. The audience laughed more at the musicians, Mikhail Mypansarov and Bertha Vinayshinski in male drag, who played John Cage riffs with an aerosol can, crinkling cellophane, bubble wrap, and assorted barks and meows. At one point the Carolyn Brown surrogate walked over and shushed them. Except for their wigs, the three dancers played it quite straight. it was interesting to see how wrong they could go and still be doing choreography.

The variations in Paquita showed off the virtuosic if eccentric skills of the ensemble. Ballerina Svetlana Lofatkina had to stop to tie the ribbons on her toe shoes, but she later redeemed herself by doing about 20 fouettés just off the music, for which she was effusively congratulated by her colleagues. When her partner, Igor Teupleze, ran out of changements halfway through his solo music, he vamped through the rest with vaudeville bits. The program also included an outrageous Dying Swan (Bertha Vinayshinski) who bourréed on in a cloud of molted feathers and whose prolonged and melodramatic fadeout was worthy of a 1930s gangster movie.