It’s understandable that anyone, well, me, would first think about the Harlem Globetrotters when learning that Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo—“Trocks” to their buds—is coming back to town. After all, the Trocks, who perform Feb. 7 and 8 at Cal State Long Beach’s Carpenter Center, and the Globetrotters are each all-male comedy groups whose humor tends to be broad, physical and derived from tweaking the conventions of what they love—the Globetrotters with hoops, the Trocks with ballet.

There is one major difference. While the Globetrotters look like male basketball players—are male basketball players—the Trocks are men dressed up as ballerinas, dancing as ballerinas, dying as ballerinas. The Harlem Globetrotters—save for one brief collaboration between Meadowlark Lemon and Merce Cunningham—do not go up on pointe.

The Trocks go up on pointe. Dudes up on pointe. Dudes playing dying swans . . . yes, yes, Matthew Bourne used men to play dying swans, but Bourne’s swans were male. The Trock swan, as with all the characters they play, is derived from the traditional conventions of ballet.

The Trocks’ schtick is to take that convention and play upon it—first to jar you with some big guy in a tutu up on pointe, then to draw you in, then to jar you once again.

“We’re not trying to imitate women, but we’re not going for Hulk Hogan either,” says Trocks artistic director Tory Dobrin. “We want our dancers to play with the convention of the character, to get involved in the character, but we encourage our dancers to be themselves, to bring something to the part that is fundamentally them. That’s the essence of all good performance.”

Upon hearing this, my thoughts instantly transition from the Globetrotters to Bugs Bunny. Bugs plays women all the time—occasionally going up on pointe—and though he does it so well that sometimes, you know, you get a little turned on, you always know it’s Bugs.

“Bugs Bunny,” says Dobrin upon hearing my dazzling analysis. “Yes, yes.” (Yes, yes.)

“Yeah, Bugs Bunny, I like that,” Dobrin contines. “Absolutely, we encourage our performers to bring a lot of themselves to the roles. I mean, we’re not a museum. No one is told to do it like the person before them. We give them pretty large latitude as performers. That’s why the company stays alive. Swan Lake, for example, the dancing is not different, they’re all performing the same choreography, but it’s the characterization that is different and that’s what keeps us fresh and alive.”

So while one Trock will play the Swan dignified, building a majestic moment that makes the inevitable pie-in-the-face funny, another will play it timid and neurotic, milking a steady stream of laughs so that the humor comes out of the inevitability of the thing.

Trockadero has been doing this since 1974. Though it has Monte Carlo in its name, the troupe is actually a product of New York, having started way-off Broadway. Today, they tour almost constantly and worldwide, including a tour of Japan that has taken on cult-like proportions.

“Big in Japan,” Dobrin says.

But, big as they are, it seems inevitable that someone will intimate that the humor they milk comes at ballet’s expense.

“Oh, someone will always criticize, always claim you’re being disrespectful,” Dobrin says. “Ballet is way, way too hard to devote your whole life to, to make fun of.”

Indeed, all of the Trocks are classically trained and come from solid to well-known dance companies including, hello, Merce Cunningham.

“Ballet is way too hard to do not to love it,” Dobrin says. “But the point is, for us, the point is to be funny. If it’s funny, we go with it.”

Tags: ballet, carpenter center, Long Beach, swan lake, trockadero