40 Years (and Counting), the Trocks Continue to Delight

Tory Drobin, the artistic director of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo (The Trocks) joined the company in 1980, when this all-male ballet troupe was a downtown NYC sensation. 40 years later, they continue to astound with their mix of professional ballet and comedy.

The professional dance company's repertoire includes all the classic and modern works, faithfully re-created right down to the tutus and toe shoes. Imagine strong, athletic men en pointe or in flight with as much grace as a world-class ballerina performing the role of a princess or a swan. And yes, it's okay to laugh. They want you to. Their comedy is on point with their dance.

This talented troupe of male ballet dancers in full drag has been delighting audiences since 1974, a time when no man danced en pointe. The gender reversal was initially a downtown, down-low, subversive art form performed late at night. The audience was largely LGBTQ+ people at a time when the gay rights movement was in its infancy. The combination of extraordinary dance and outrageous, bawdy humor caught on, and the Trocks have, over the past half century, graced some of the greatest stages around the world.

Luckily, it's time for their bi-annual return to the Joyce Theater in New York City with a delightful holiday show for the hometown. Tory Dobrin, the Trocks' artistic director, promises two programs performed in repertory that "would be enjoyable for everybody."

EDGE recently spoke with Dobrin, who began his career with The Trocks as a dancer in 1980, as he prepared for their 2024 performance.

EDGE: Tell me what The Trocks is.

Tory Dobrin: It's pretty simple. We're an all-male comedy ballet company.

EDGE: And you're serious dancers.

Tory Dobrin: Yes, absolutely, we're serious dancers. We're serious comedians. I guess you can't say we're serious males, but we are a male company doing all the roles that ballerinas normally do, but we do it in drag for comedy purposes.

EDGE: How do you find the funny in it?

Tory Dobrin: It really depends on what, specifically, we're working on. When we're planning a program, we want to be sure that inside the program there are a lot of different things. We look for different comedy, different types of costumes, and lots of new kinds of music and personalities. We do have a lot of stock jokes that are music hall jokes and vaudeville jokes that we move around in the repertory, but the real answer is, when we do a new piece, a new work, we stage it just like any other ballet company. We do not put any jokes in at all during the rehearsal process. We just do the technical aspect of the ballet vocabulary.

The guys who joined Trocadero joined for a lot of different reasons. A lot of them are interested in drag, a lot of them are interested in dancing en pointe, which is something a woman normally does and a man does not. But they're all comedians. They've got this free-spirit, funny bone aspect, and you don't find that outlet in classical ballet. When you join a big ballet company, or even a small one, it's not particularly funny, not particularly fun. It's interesting and challenging, but fun is not a vocabulary used. When we're rehearsing these ballets, we try to keep the atmosphere friendly and fun. The guys are funny, and they just start developing things that are natural to them and what they're doing. It's not really an intellectual process. It's more an improvisational process. There's no improvisation on stage, but during rehearsal there is. We develop it. There's a lot of creativity going into what's happening on stage.

EDGE: Where do you find your dancers? Or do they find you?

Tory Dobrin: Most dance companies announce auditions where a lot of people come. We don't do that. If we get an email from somebody, or if we need dancers and advertise in appropriate places, we invite them to come to rehearsals and take company classes. I ask them to stay for a few hours just to see how they are. I'm looking for three things: I'm looking for a good dancer, and you can tell if someone's a good dancer right away. I'm also looking for someone who has a sense of humor. You can tell just by talking to someone if they've got a little bit of a spark. Then I look to see if they're a team player. Are they dressed appropriately for a class? A ballet class has a protocol of manners about how to behave. It's very, very subtle, but it's very clear. If you're coming into a class, you kind of wait to see where the senior members are. They have their spot, and you work your way in. You don't just barge in and make your statement.

EDGE: How are you perceived by your contemporaries?

Tory Dobrin: Fifty years into it we're perceived very well. And we're perceived well because we get really good reviews and we've lasted a long time. We work a lot. We perform way more than most dance companies, so the dancing is really good, really good. There's nothing to be minimizing about. Now, in the early years when I joined, which was 1980, it was not well-respected at all by anyone in the in the dance world. It was disrespected, in fact. Being a company of all gay men during the AIDS crisis, we were affected by this a lot. There would often be benefits to raise money, and we would not be invited. I used to think, "What the hell." Everyone was suffering. I'm not minimizing anyone's suffering, but our numbers were greater, and it was really terrible for the organization, yet we weren't being invited to these benefits. That's all changed now, but in the late '80s and early '90s, it was a kind of disrespect.

EDGE: Wasn't it a very late-night, underground happening when it started?

Tory Dobrin: Yeah, the first performances were done in a loft on 14th Street near 10th Avenue. I think it's the Gucci store now. It was in a loft that was an offshoot of the Mattachine Society called the West Side Discussion Group. The Mattachine Society was one of the first gay and lesbian political organizations in America. It was founded in the 1950s. The shows were at midnight, and they were very, very successful, and, believe me, it wasn't the show we do today. Those guys probably wouldn't even be considered dancers today. They were more actors who moved and danced a little bit. But that's how the company got started.

EDGE: Was there a big break along the way?

Tory Dobrin: There was a woman, Betty Connor, at UC Berkeley who was running the performance arts there at the time. It's a very important venue for performances in the United States because they have a huge budget. She booked the company there in '75, and her support allowed other theaters to feel comfortable booking us. I like to say she was like our fairy godmother. Twenty years after we were booked there, we performed at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. That's a long way to go in a short time.

EDGE: How do men and women dance differently?

Tory Dobrin: Do you like tennis? Let's think of Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi. When they practice on the court, they do the same exact strokes, overhead, running to the net and so forth. Then you watch them on the court and, visually, there's a lot of finesse and a lot of grace with Graf. It just feels artistic. But with Agassi it looks like he's just brute force hitting the ball.

It's the same thing with ballet. Women start early dancing en pointe. They're teenagers. They don't know how to dance. When they are learning to dance en pointe, they're learning how to dance. They have to start pointe work early because it has to achieve a level of finesse for classical ballet. You can only do that if you start very young. Our guys, for the most part, are trained dancers. They just add the skill of dancing en pointe, but they, generally speaking, don't have the finesse.

Also, women tend to be lighter, so the use of the foot in the pointe work lends itself to finesse. A guy is much heavier. The pointe work is very strong, very powerful. It's very different than a woman's pointe because of the body type, the bigger legs, the stronger musculature. Men also tend to have bigger, stronger shoulders, whereas women tend to be bigger in the hip area. I may sound like I'm stereotyping, but it's a very different look.

EDGE: How do you decide who plays the male or female roles?

Tory Dobrin: We don't think about male, female. Everybody has to do every role. Everybody has to dance en pointe. Everybody has to do a male role if it's appropriate. If you're in three ballets in a night, you don't want to be en pointe for all three of them. You can do it for two of the ballets, but by the third ballet your feet are dead. Instead, you go into a male role where you're not en pointe. That's how we mix it up. Most people who join the company want to dance the ballerina roles because it's drag, it's more fun. But everyone does everything, and everybody knows they're not going to be pigeon-holed, so they're not resentful.

EDGE: What can you expect as an audience member? Is it at all like the silly drag Benny Hill used to do?

Tory Dobrin: It might have been in the 1970s, but now we're in '24, so I like to say it's fun, it's dance, it's colorful. You come to laugh and enjoy the comedy, but what you see is really high-level technical ballet skills. People coming for the first time aren't expecting that, and they're always astounded by how good the dancing really is and the high quality of the production values.

EDGE: Are you still an all-gay company?

Tory Dobrin: Every dancer on stage is gay. I think in the history of Trocadero we've had two straight dancers. And then we've had a few dancers that were straight when they came in and then became gay. Does that mean they were in the closet? We had one who came in straight, became gay, and now he's straight again. So, it's a mixed bag. The ballet master and me are gay, but the people behind the scenes are not gay.

EDGE: What do you do as the artistic director?

Tory Dobrin: The artistic director of any organization sets the tone. In my specific case, we're a small organization and when you're a small organization it's best not to have a lot of fascistic tendencies. The people in upper management, we talk about everything. I guess ultimately I make the decision, but I'm pretty sensible. The artistic director sets the tone and hires and fires the dancers. I don't push my weight around. In my 40 years doing this I think I've fired three people. I choose the ballets, work with the executive director to organize the tours, talk to the production manager about the look of the show. Much of this I do in conjunction with the ballet master, who was also a long-time member of the company as a dancer.

EDGE: You started out with the Trocks as a dancer. Did you ever envision, 40 years later, you would be here?

Tory Dobrin: Not at all. Sometimes late at night, when I'm lying there, I think, "How did this happen?" And I'm fine with it. I've had a good time. Would you do anything differently? I don't normally think like that, but if I would think like that I don't know what it would be. I've spent a lot of time on the road. I've been in all of those 600 cities. Looking back now, I think, "How did I survive that?" When I'm walking on the street of New York and I see a tour bus go by, I have that feeling, "Oh, no." The idea of going to an airport now just makes me nuts.

EDGE: In your upcoming program you have two options. How do I decide which one to see?

Tory Dobrin: We go to the Joyce every two years, and they always want two programs because we're there for three weeks. One of the programs has only one intermission at their request, and the other one is a bit longer and has two intermissions.

The first program (A) includes Giselle Act II, which is a very interesting ballet that we've done for a long time. The set is by Edward Gorey, and it's done in a very macabre way. It's not light-hearted, necessarily, because it's an intense story. But it's very funny. The ballet closing that evening is a new work called Symphony, which is based on a George Balanchine ballet called Symphony. It's actually a premiere, so people who come to see us every two years would be more interested in this because they haven't seen it yet, but probably have seen Swan Lake.

The second program (B) has Swan Lake Act II, Yes, Virginia, Another Piano Ballet, and, after the second intermission, concludes with Raymonda's Wedding. It has more variety, it's longer, and a little bit more fun. I guess it really depends on how familiar you are with the company.

EDGE: And it's only done every other year?

Tory Dobrin: It's become a tradition around the holidays. It's perfect for people who want to see dance but don't want to see The Nutcracker. It works well for us. I'm a little protective. We don't want to overexpose ourselves to New York. Every two years for three weeks seems like a good rhythm.

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo performs through January 5, 2025 at The Joyce Theater, 175 8th Avenue at West 19th Street, New York City. For ticket information, follow this link.

For upcoming performance dates for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, visit their website.

Watch Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo company member Ida Nevasayneva (Paul Ghiselin) perform "The Dying Swan"