Dec 17
40 Years (and Counting), the Trocks Continue to Delight
Nicholas Dussault READ TIME: 12 MIN.
Source: Giovanni Daniotti
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.
