On its 50th birthday, really looking no more than 39 (except for the molting swan), Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo is returning to the Joyce Theater, frivolity and frippery intact. In anticipation, I had a conversation with Artistic Director Tory Dobrin.
Dobrin says the company gets about 25 inquiries a year from dancers. Unlike theater and film casting, no one is hired from a video. Aspirants are welcome to come to a class wherever the Trocks are touring. Auditions are held in person.
Are the men already skilled on point?
The first program
“I think just about every boy dancer has played around with it. Some are strong and immediately start to take class on point, others have to work at it. If they’re trained dancers with that musculature, then adding point technique is not that hard. It’s sort of like tennis. Women and men play the same game in terms of strokes, but generally women have more finesse and men just hit the ball really hard. I’m exaggerating. The guys can get up and down on point but we’re looking for finesse.”
What about skill with comedy?
“The Trocks are friendly and welcoming. If someone has an easy smile and laughs a bit – you can tell if he has a sense of humor. At first, not so much comedy is required of a dancer. As someone gets better with point work and understands our type of humor, we start moving him around. Tatiana Youbetyabootskaya, an exception, instantly showed us freestyle comedy and went right into leading roles.”
Swan Lake (Photo: Vito Lorusso)
“There’s a lot of shtick. Every ballet has some. We try not to repeat a joke. The kitchen sink is thrown into Swan Lake. For some, it’s over the top, others call it their favorite. Dying Swan also has a campy element. The important thing is not the ballets, it’s what the performers do with material.”
A dancer is encouraged to make a role his own during rehearsal. They’re class clowns. Dobrin then shapes and curates. “You explain what each character is about. They find their own reactions. It’s fun for a dancer. Some you need to nurture and others you just need to get out of their way.”
The Trocks are also celebrating the 30th anniversary of Olga Supphozova (Robert Carter) “who made her first public appearance in a KGB lineup under dubious circumstances. After a seven-year-to-life hiatus, she now returns to her adoring fans. When questioned about her forced sabbatical, Olga’s only comment was “I did it for Art’s sake.” Art said nothing, however.
Swan Lake (Photo: Giovanni Daniotti)
The artistic director keeps a casting list. When he was a dancer in the company, leads were leads. Dobrin feels that anyone who wants to and can should get the opportunity to play a role. All are cast in multiples creating team atmosphere. The only exception, he tells me, is The Dying Swan which Carter plays more often as he’s both senior and does it marvelously.
The 15 member company has five new dancers: Tatiana Youbetyabootskaya – “created many original roles in St. Petersburg where she was the last of a long line of Italian étoiles to appear at the Maryinsky Theater…” Gerd Tord -“The Prune Danish of Russian Ballet, abandoned an enormously successful career as a film actress to become a Trockadero ballerina…” Blagovesta Zlotmachinskaya – “Ever since her auspicious debut as Left Nostril in the ballet extracted from The Nose by Gogol, Blagovesta has shown a unique appreciation of her homeland’s literary heritage…”
Bertha Vinayshinsky -“has defected to America three times and been promptly returned on each occasion – for “artistic reasons…” and Moussia Shebarkarova -“A celebrated child prodigy back in the Brezhnev era, Moussia Shebarkarova astounded her parents at the age of two by taking a correspondence course in ballet…” This is one program whose biographies you’ll want to read.
Go for Barocco (Photo: José Luis Marrero Medina)
It seems that many of the company’s technical staff are women. I ask how that occurred. “Because we’re a touring company and all the people on stage are male, there’s no Yin and Yang unless I hire women.”
(Yin and Yang is a concept originating in Chinese philosophy that describes an opposite but interconnected, self-perpetuating cycle. The “sides” are complementary and at the same time opposing forces in which the whole is greater than the assembled parts, i.e. women and men.)
“Men and women often react differently. Men can be aggressive, women likely a little more nurturing. If it’s only aggressive males, there’s a woman around to talk to and offer different perspective. We go into a theater and our tech head Shelby Sonnenberg, our production manager, is already there to welcome us. It’s a balance thing.” Dobrin apologizes for seeming chauvinist. Things just work that way.
The Company (Photo: Zoran Jelenic)
Apparently other companies are slowly adding men in tutus. A dancer at Pacific Northwest Ballet has executed “tutu roles” and guested at New York City Ballet in a role written for a woman. There are isolated examples.
What’s on your bucket list, I ask. “The major one is just to survive. We’ve really been everywhere we can possibly go except the Arab states. Returning is always a bigger challenge. The third and fourth time people become judgmental. In the end, however, they come to have a good time.” As will you.
Opening Photo – Zoran Jelenic
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo December 17- January 5
The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue
