By Diane Parkes.
A stage phenomenon for more than 50 years, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo return to Southampton this spring with their signature blend of virtuoso dance and humour.
The all-male company who are renowned internationally for their unique take on classical and modern ballet are touring to 14 venues including Mayflower Theatre on 19 and 20 May.
The company’s artistic director Tory Dobrin is promising a show to remember to audiences, both new and those familiar with The Trocks, as they are affectionately known.
“The most important element for our company is that the audience enjoy themselves, this is absolutely paramount to us. We also wish for audience members to come in expecting to laugh and walk away with a great appreciation of the technical prowess of the dancers because they are all very accomplished.
“In London, at the Peacock Theatre, I often stand on the stairs and listen to the audience reaction as they exit the theatre. I hear many of them saying ‘we expected to laugh and have a good time but we didn’t expect them to be such good dancers’.
Formed in New York City in 1974, The Trocks began life as a late-night show on LGBTQ+ stages but word quickly spread. Over the decades the company has become an international success story, performing in nearly 700 cities in more than 40 countries.
Tory, who joined The Trocks in 1980 as a dancer and became artistic director in the early 1990s, says audiences worldwide have not only increased in number but also in diversity so the shows are now popular across the generations.
“If you think back to when the company was formed in 1974 and when I joined in 1980, society has very much changed since then in regards to the LGBTQ+ community,” he recalls.
“Our mission hasn’t changed: we still try to do the best possible show. But now, as we are more well known, we attract bigger audiences. The biggest change is that, now, we have children in the audience. We never had children at the beginning, it just wasn’t possible in terms of what society accepted.”
“People have always come because they knew it was going to be a fun evening. Now they’re also saying ‘why don’t we bring our children, our grandparents, our LGBTQ+ friends, our local dance people who will enjoy it?’ There are so many things about the company that people love.”
Trocks come from across the globe and are highly trained – and they need to be as they are performing a whole host of roles including those of both male dancers and ballerinas en pointe.
“What we do is actually really difficult and requires a lot of effort and skill,” Tory says. “In order to achieve a good show, we spend a lot of time working at it. Our approach is that one takes one’s personality and then applies it to the role as it is supposed to be in terms of the style of the original ballet.
“We are not trying to dance as women because we’re not women. In fact, most women dancers don’t dance alike either, they are all individuals. You take your personality as a male person and you apply it to the roles you do.”
The company have a massive repertoire and, in the UK and Ireland, will be dancing a choice of programmes featuring excerpts from classics Swan Lake, Paquita and The Dying Swan as well as Metal Garden, a contemporary work by American choreographer Seán Curran. The aim of each programme is to create a finely balanced performance.
“For us, a good and enjoyable show has variety. We have different lead dancers in every ballet and every act,” Tory says. “Then we look for an array of colours in the costumes and an array of music so one is not seeing or hearing the same thing all night long.
“After that, we look at what we’ve done before. We’ve been to the UK and Ireland quite a lot of times and we know, for example, that everyone loves Swan Lake. We always have a new cast member doing it, so the humour is always different. We always bring ballets that the audience might know as well as something new so they aren’t seeing the same thing every time.”
Tory and the team are looking forward to the tour which is presented by Dance Consortium, a group of 24 large-scale UK and Ireland venues who bring top quality international dance to local audiences.
“The audiences in the UK are super boisterous and super fun – I think that is the tradition of the music hall and pantomime,” says Tory. “That is fun for the audience but also for us. It’s like if you’re at a party and you’re telling a good joke and everyone is laughing.
“A lot of the dancers have been with us for a while and have become familiar with the UK. We all have our favourite cafes or restaurants or museums etc. It gives one a sense of wellbeing to go back to a place you enjoyed yourself and feel at home. In 2018 we were one of the first companies to perform after the renovation of the Mayflower Theatre which is such an important venue. We look forward to returning this time around.”
Tickets for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo (Tuesday 19– Wednesday 20 May 2026) are on sale at mayflower.org.uk or 02380 711811.
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