That sound, not quite a tapping. It isn’t clunky, it’s lighter — the sound of wood beating against a hard surface. I’m moving toward it, climbing the stairs to the fourth floor of The Joyce Theater’s New York Center for Dance and Creativity. On the way up, posters line the walls — on one, a dancer from Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, or The Trocks, as they’re known, floats midair in pointe shoes, arms outstretched, a fluffy tutu extending from the waist, a full drag beat. At the top of the stairs, it becomes clear the sound is pointe shoes, their wooden toe boxes tap-tapping against the studio floor with every bourrée, grande jeté, fouetté. Here, dancers from the Trocks are rehearsing. On December 17, their three-week engagement at The Joyce Theater in Chelsea began, closing out the company’s 50th year.

Since it began in 1974, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo has become both known and beloved for its unique contribution to dance: Its entire company of male dancers perform in drag, always in the spirit of appreciating ballet with cleverness and cheek. Its roots begin in New York in the 1960s where queer theatre pioneers like Charles Ludlam and John Vaccaro, leading practitioners of the Theatre of the Ridiculous genre, bent and broke traditional gender presentations onstage with drag, camp, and a whole lot of glitter. From this world emerged the dancer Larry Rée, who danced in drag and created the character Madame Ekathrina Sobechanskaya. Rée performed the famous ballet solo “The Dying Swan” from Swan Lake in Ludlam’s work as well as that of playwright Jackie Curtis and drag troupe The Cockettes. Seeing the success of the solo in the 1970s, a time when much of the U.S. was obsessed with ballet, Rée created the Trockadero Gloxinia Ballet Company in 1972. Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo was borne of it in 1974, when company members Peter Anastos, Anthony Bassae, and Natch Taylor wanted to pay more attention to ballet, while also nodding to camp and comedy.

In August of that year, the company debuted at what was then the West Side Discussion Group queer community center in the Meatpacking District. They soon drew a following from the established ballet world–lauded New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce had given them a rave review–and the downtown queer world. Soon, they’d be on TV, in magazines, and famous the world over. Despite their fame, however, being in the Trocks was still considered a career killer for dancers, and aside from the entertainment factor, few serious ballet companies were interested in their work. To be openly gay men, dancing in drag and on pointe, was something many people at the time eschewed with a firm hand. Some even thought their work stigmatized the male dancer, said Artistic Director Tory Dobrin, who first joined the company as a dancer in 1980. Over time, however, as more people got to see what the Trocks were about–they have appeared as the subject of not just one but three documentaries in the last 25 years, including one which aired with PBS’s American Masters — it attracted more trained dancers who were excited to join. It became a career option.

“As the years went on, we started attracting more accomplished dancers, and that also helped the quality to elevate. When I joined, I was older, and also it was a different time to be gay in the 1970s and 80s, as you can imagine,” Dobrin says. “A young dancer who’s interested in comedy, who’s interested in drag, who’s interested in pointe work, they [now] feel comfortable to come.”

While the company’s history encompasses everything from Kennedy Center performances to National Endowment of the Arts funding, their past is not just one of stardust — it’s also one of survival. In the 1980s, AIDS put the Trocks, like many arts organizations at the time, in serious danger. “The AIDS crisis caused all sorts of mayhem, as you can imagine, not only organizationally, but psychologically and emotionally,” Dobrin says. He remembers the trauma of losing friends and colleagues regularly. They also had to contend with an ongoing National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) ordeal–in which government officials regularly tried to either dismantle the organization or prevent it entirely from presenting artwork it deemed “indecent” or “obscene”–threatened the possibility of the Trocks even being booked. “Theaters were afraid to present us for fear of losing their grant[s] or their money coming from the government or other sources,” Dobrin says. But by the 1990s, as protease inhibitors helped to counter the effects of HIV/AIDS, the Trocks managed to have successful tours of Japan and England. “Somehow you just keep going,” he says. That the company was able to survive is, he continues, “a tremendous goal and accomplishment.”

Robert Carter joined the company in 1995 and has been dancing with the Trocks ever since. “They call me Mama,” he smiles when we chat during the company’s rehearsal break. His hair has been dyed a leopard print, and there are piercings through his nose, chin, and ears. Carter arrived at the Trocks after performing with the Dance Theatre of Harlem and the later defunct Bay Ballet Theater in Tampa, Florida. He had seen the Trocks perform as a boy in his native South Carolina. While young male dancers may be discouraged by teachers from learning pointe, Carter wasn’t. Not that it would have stuck after he saw the Trocks, anyway. “After being told by so many people, or people sharing their opinion, that it wouldn’t be right, boys don’t dance on pointe, I thought, well, here’s a group of guys that does exactly what I want to do,” he says. “I’ve always been like the class clown anyway, so I fit right in.”

Carter stayed, he says, for the artistic freedom and the possibility of having a long career. “It’s like handing a teenager the keys to a new car,” he laughs. “Of course, they reined me in, but I’ve never felt like I’ve had to be so reined in.” Trocks dancers are encouraged to make each character their own while still honoring ballet technique and canon–there’s the freedom to be silly within the bounds of very serious ballet work. “I happen to be a man portraying what looks to you like a woman through this comic dance, but the message really is about art in any and all forms comes from the most unexpected places,” Carter says.

Andrea Fabbri came to the Trocks a little over a year ago, in 2023, after seven years with the Estonian National Ballet. There, he says, he was playing “a lot of very intense, straight-male-presenting men that were getting cheated on by their wives.” When I arrive at rehearsal, however, he is in a leotard and tutu, pale pink pointe shoes on his feet, his hair in a loose bun. At eight or nine, Fabbri remembers, he actually took a class with the Trocks’ current ballet master and former company member, Raffaele Morra, when the troupe visited his native Italy. Later, he regularly watched the Trocks’ eponymous 2001 concert film on YouTube. While a ballet student of 15 or 16 at South Florida’s HARID Conservatory, he even emailed the company about auditioning. (They told him to try after he had more years in the field.) And so he ended up working with more classical companies first. “In the ballet world, Trockoadero is usually seen as a very entertaining show. I don’t think people realize, and I didn’t as well, how much work goes [on] behind [the scenes],” he says. “It’s not just about the funny moment.”

Despite his earlier roles, Fabbri is excited about being able to engage with his feminine side. “I’ve always had a little bit [of] that side, the creative side. Now it just gets to come out in a red lip,” he laughs. He remembered being bullied for this feminine side when he was younger in ballet classes — “I would do female variations on the side secretly, and I would get caught, that already was a problem for them,” he says. But now things are different. “I don’t feel like I have to hide any part of me,” he says. “I feel so free now, and that’s the main difference. I just feel like Andrea, right? There’s no filter.”

This is the power of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. Founded in the throes of the Gay Liberation Movement, the company runs on the freedom of self-expression and, of course, a love of ballet. “I’m actually doing what my younger self wished he could do in the future, but never knew that he could,” Fabbri says.

“If you want to see an entertaining show with guys in drag on pointe, you have to go see the Trockadero. That’s the only way.”

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