Swans were plucked again

The show "Trokadero" at the Moscow Estrada Theater of American Show Truppa Les Ballets Trocadero de Monte-Carlo (USA) has been amusing the world for a classic dance for 30 years. Founded in 1974 and famous for participating in the Broadway shows, it shows semicircular compositions where men hilariously ridiculously depict ballerinas, putting down the 45th sizes, huge packs, patch hips, busts and alternating exaggerated mults with acrobatic tricks.

Our audience is clearly familiar with imitations of their genre (programs of the St. Petersburg “Male Ballet Valery Mikhailovsky” and “bright stream” by Alexei Ratmansky at the Bolshoi Theater). The original Muscovites first saw a couple of years ago. And here is a new visit. The same pointe-bubble-pure. The same (with the exception of a pair of numbers) program. And the same inconsistent, much more funny than all the clown mumps: the troupe does not so much laugh at the classic as it admires it, masking the desire to dance high -quality choreography by attributes of the parody genre.

One of the real problems of today's serious dance is that many choreographers find it difficult to tell the world about and only forth their and other people's plastic finds of recent decades. The dance loses the properties of the artistic language and turns into a set of techniques that are easy to declare cliches or stamps. But what to do with stamps, how not to parody them? But when, like Trocadero, you take the Swan Lake, what exactly will you mimic? That is the problem: the classical choreography of Leo Ivanov is not a stamp, but the most opening of his time.

Trocadero gets away from this question and does not compete with the classic. Reproducing the main episodes of the second act, they amuse the audience with the incoming details: comic grimaces of a dozen swans, then falling inappropriately in the middle of the action, then dashingly dancing the dance of the notorious four, by the opera tantrums of the evil wizard, on the leg of the two -meter "Odette" from the stupid prince, and the same jokes.

There is no need to transform and parody dances originally intended for the female corpsx and soloists. It is enough to master them to get a comical performance. Trocadero does so. Dancers, apparently, are glad to perform high -quality choreography, for which they would not take up the parody of the parody. The object of the parody, therefore, defeats those who were going to ridicule him.

The same thing happens with the famous romantic ensemble "Pa de Catre" - a portrait of the stars of the 19th century, composed of fragments of their parties. Trocadero offers a cartoon, without spending fantasy on the transformation of choreography, but simply replacing a high ballerin with a squat dancer, thin - muscular and so on. Well, the funniest in the Trocadero cartoon collection is a “dying swan”: a dried dancer, made up with an ancient old woman. With trembling legs, he prescribes a drawing of Fokinsky choreography, and swan feathers are pouring from his cuezza packs.

02/04/2007 / Yaroslav Sedov, the material was published in the "newspaper" No. 20 dated 05.02.2007.