Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, affectionately known as The Trocks, graced the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland on February 12 as part of the White Bird Dance Series. The Trocks, an all-male ballet company that parodies classical ballet and pays homage to the legendary Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, performs both male and female roles, balancing physical comedy with technical skill.

The company celebrated its 50th anniversary last year and remains hugely popular worldwide. Portland, in particular, has warmly welcomed it for many years: This was their sixth performance in the city since 1999.

The Trocks were co-founded in 1974 by Peter Anastos, Natch Taylor, and Anthony Bassae. The company emerged from the aftermath of the Stonewall Riots, a series of protests by the LGBTQ+ community against police raids at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, in 1969. They began performing in late-night off-off Broadway spaces around New York, and after a favorable review from dance writer Arlene Croce of The New Yorker and a photo shoot with photographer Richard Avedon for Vogue magazine, the company became known to a broader audience and its popularity boomed.

The February 12 program opened with Le Lac Des Cygnes (Swan Lake, Act ll) choreography after Lev Ivanovich Ivanov performed by an unruly corps de ballet of swans, including the Four Little Swans quartet and the Dying Swan Solo, performed by veteran Trock dancer Robert Carter, who molts feathers down the diagonal of the stage on its last dramatic flight of bourrées before succumbing to crippling old age and a dramatically beautiful death.

The choreography included a variety of comedic gags, such as late entrances, falls, forgotten choreography, and accidental kicks in the face, to name just a few. All while seemingly performing a serious Russian ballet, with the lead, Jake Speakman, who plays both Colette Adae (Odette) and Timur Legupskin (Prince Siegfried), dancing so skillfully and beautifully on pointe that I forgot I was watching a man. That also goes for Carter, who has danced as a Trock since 1995.

The performance continued with Peter Anastos’ Yes, Virginia, Another Piano Ballet, which was intended as a critique of the piano ballet genre, but was lost on me because I don’t know the other piano ballets to begin with. But maybe that was the point.

Following this was Elena Kunikova’s Valpurgeyeva Noch (Walpurgisnacht), a lively, Soviet-style bacchanal. The stage was filled with fauns, nymphs, and other mythological creatures galloping about in joyous exuberance. Immense silliness ensued. The evening then took an unexpected turn, concluding not with the final bows of the dancers but with a humorous but seriously delivered Riverdance spoof that left the audience laughing as we scrambled to exit the theater to get ahead of the crowd.

Sponsor

But I felt disconnected as I sat in the mezzanine of the vast Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, which seats 2,776. The Trocks’ comedy isn’t just communicated through the dancers’ bodies but also from their faces: The wide-eyed exaggeration, the winks, the dramatic grimaces, haughty expressions, and so on, are the finesse that makes their satire effective. From my seat, those details were lost. I could see the broad strokes and the grand gestures, but the nuanced humor from facial expressions and drag-queen-level makeup was missing.

Dance companies that perform at the Schnitz are historic cultural icons and are widely popular. The seating needed to accommodate those audiences is immense. I get that. But for me, so much is lost in a dance performance when you are sitting so far away and can’t make out any details in the dancers’ costumes or faces.

My first encounter with the Trocks was 25 years ago at The Joyce Theater in New York, where I worked as an usher during my starving-artist days, trying to make it as a dancer in New York. It was the only way I could afford to see big dance companies perform at the time. The Joyce has 472 seats, and I could see all of the performance details while standing in the back of the theater with my fellow ushers, so I already knew the full extent of what their performances offer, and I wanted that again.

After the performance, I wanted to reconnect with the Trocks on my terms, so I decided to watch the documentary Rebels on Pointe, directed by Bobbi Jo Hart. White Bird had previously screened it for audiences for free before the live performance, but I couldn’t make it, so I rented the hour-and-a-half film on Amazon Prime for $3.99.

Filmed over four years and released in 2017, Rebels on Pointe offers an intimate look at the company’s history, narrated by artistic director Tory Dobrin. He discusses the company’s inception, the devastation of AIDS on the company and the broader arts community, and the refuge found in creating a space for dancers to express their identities beyond traditional gender norms in ballet.

The film highlights the dancers’ individual stories and relationships while showcasing the demanding rehearsal and touring schedules that often consume a huge part of their lives. The dancers looked tired.

The IMBD website says the film “ultimately celebrates our shared humanity through universal themes of identity, dreams, family, love, loss, determination, and resilience … proving that a ballerina is not merely a woman dancing, but an act of revolution in a tutu.”

Sponsor

“An act of revolution in a tutu.” I love that!

After the film, I compared the cast list to the dancers I had just seen perform. Most of the dancers from the film were no longer with the company. Initially, this made me sad. But then I realized that every dancer who had been with the company was changed by the experience and had taken that seed and planted it elsewhere, nurturing a new safe space for gender-fluid dancers. And that’s what we want. We want this idea that dancers of any gender can dance however they want to on stage, to grow beyond Ballet Trockadero and change the world.

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo are much more than a schtick about big hairy-chested men dancing as dainty women in pink tutus with gigantic point shoes. They have opened up the world of ballet to a broader audience through comedy, taking away the intimidation factor of ballet and relieving the pressure to understand what’s happening on stage, giving audiences permission to laugh. They have also carved out space for gender fluidity and self-expression within a traditionally rigid art form, allowing audiences to become comfortable with men — and particularly gay men — dancing female roles unapologetically on stage.

That said, watching the Trocks in 2025, I yearned for something beyond parody. While the lead dancers are often superb, the corps intentionally plays up the comic elements of a chaotic student recital with many mistakes and bad technique. It’s funny, but I also want to see male dancers on pointe taken seriously. I want to see extraordinary dancers, regardless of gender, performing whatever role they choose without it being framed as a joke. The lead dancers in the performance were so breathtaking that, while I was watching them, I thought I was seeing women dance, proof that classical ballet’s restrictive aesthetics do not define beauty and that what I find beautiful is much broader than that tired aesthetic.

I’m ready to see true representation in ballet, not just a row of identically waifish white women, but a whole range of body types, backgrounds, and identities. The Trocks have opened the door, but I want to step through it now. I want to see technical brilliance in all its variety, not just as parody, but as the real thing.