How can you not love a troupe whose stage names include Ludmilla Beaulemova, Maria Paranova and Nadezhda Bogdownova? Formed 34 years ago in New York, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo are the world’s greatest ballet parodists, combining rock-solid classical technique with a blazing love for the art form and a fiendish eye for its conventions and pretensions.
The all-male company’s trampling over ballet’s strict male-female divide makes for terrific entertainment, their specific target being a particularly Russian strain of hubris that they prick as much with their pseudonyms as with their dancing. And certainly, their dancing is a joy.
