Tutus and Testosterone: Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo

Sadler’s Wells, London
May 5, 2026

Male dancers. Tutus. Pointe shoes. You think you know what is coming: drag, parody, a few ballet jokes. Fine. Then the fake-serious pre-show announcement starts poking holes in ballet grandeur before anyone even dances. Poor Natalia Notgoodenough, we are told, will not appear tonight. Fair enough. Some nights one simply does not feel good enough.

Then they come onstage. Oh no. They can really dance.

Founded in New York in 1974, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo is now celebrating its 50th anniversary. The all-male comedy ballet company performs classical and contemporary works en travesti and en pointe. The ballet is still there: the technique, the rhythm, the stage language. The joke grows inside it.

Their Le Lac des Cygnes sends out a flock of naughty geese: aggressive, messy, lively. Exactly. Swans are vicious. The chaos feels familiar too, like a first dance school show, where everyone knows they are performing, but nobody has quite worked out how performance works yet. The formations are there, the faces are there, the intention is there. Everyone also has one extra private thought trying to escape.

The Prince arrives like the hero of a ridiculous teenage romance: huge blond wig, handsome, full ballet Ken energy. At one point, he only has to walk slowly out from the wings, pause, walk a little more, and the audience is gone. That is timing: do almost nothing, make people laugh anyway.

Odette is a diva too. She sulks, rolls her eyes, pulls odd little faces. Who decided a Swan Queen has to be pure, tragic and waiting for rescue all evening? She can be annoyed. She can be dramatic. She can have a personality, thank you very much. The whole thing kept making me think of Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood: Men in Tights. The Trocks are not messing with ballet because they do not understand it. They understand it too well. They know exactly where to poke.

Then came Le Corsaire Pas de Deux. Outrageous. I sat there waiting for them to mess it up. They had one job: go wrong. They failed. By being good.

That is the rude part. They add a little comedy, yes, but then they actually dance the thing. The turns have to stay up, the jumps have to land, the lifts have to happen. You cannot bluff your way through this on facial expressions and false eyelashes. Suddenly all that effort becomes adorable, like children in a dance school show silently chanting: I must finish this. I must not fall. I must get through this lift. And then they do. Annoying. Good.

Metal Garden changes the joke. Six dancers walk with very silly movement, and the audience already starts laughing. By this point the room has opened: they move, people laugh. It is a dangerous power.

But it is not just nonsense. The duets and trios are sharp. The repetition is evil. One duet keeps restarting, and before the dancers even get to the eye-roll, the audience has already lost it. Then I hear the percussion. Of course. Percussion. That can go badly very fast. Percussion and dance often split into two separate dramas: one side banging away, the other side sweating politely. Here, they actually meet. The rhythm catches the body, the body catches it back, and the silliness suddenly has bite. I loved it. Technique, choreography, music, and a sly little slap at contemporary ballet that looks terribly profound while saying absolutely nothing.

Then The Dying Swan. This bird does not die nicely. She dies angrily, badly, furiously. Feathers everywhere. She will not leave. She clings to the last scrap of stage time as if someone has personally offended her by suggesting an ending. Is it funny? Yes. Did I laugh? Not really. Because honestly, same. Nobody wants to grow old. Nobody wants to stop. Nobody wants to make a graceful exit just because the music says so.

Finally, Paquita: full fireworks. By this point I had no space left in my eyes. Jumps, turns, pointe work, lifts, all coming at once. The little jokes were probably there. I missed half of them. Too busy watching the technique attack me.

The one dancer in male costume was perfect. He looked like the only boy in the whole dance school show, therefore legally required to appear. In the petit allegro, the batterie simply did not happen. Lifts went wrong. His partner made him do push-ups. Correct. Tragic. Fair.

By the end, I wanted them to throw off the tutus, kick away the pointe shoes, and tear across the stage one last time. I wanted more of that force, more of that attack, more of that shameless joy.

That is what makes Trocks so irresistible. The joke never feels thin, because the dancing underneath it is so alive. Technique is there, ego is there, bad behaviour is there, and the whole thing keeps bouncing back with ridiculous human appetite.

Not elegant. Good.

After Sadler’s Wells, the naughty geese continue across the country. More places to bite.
Presented by Dance Consortium, this 50th anniversary UK tour by Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo continues to June 24, 2026.