Charl Blignaut On stage in Johannesburg
By the time the opening night applause had died down to a cacophany of hearty gels and a veritable nursery of spring bouquets had been trundled on to the Civic Theatre stage and into the sinewy, muscled arms of that world famous troupe of male ballerinas, New York-based Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, the success of the tour was already a foregone conclusion – courtesy of the power of the pink patron.
The Civic’s makulu baas Janice Honeyman knows this and it is no coincidence that her theatre has become Johannesburg’s new pioneer of mainstream queer culture.
And swanning about on stage, camper than Baden-Powell and royal as a pudding, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo certainly lived up to these expectations. Flittering about en pointe – wide-eyed and haunted, tripping over their own cues, hogging the limelight, and all the while injecting their moves with dashes of technical prowess – it is the mission of the Trocks to send the fragile and ego-bloated idiosyncrasies of classical Russian ballet so far over the top that the whole affair takes on the form of a sustained and delectable farce. The corps as corpse, the preening ugly swan as lovely duckling, the tutu as travesty.
“Pointe taken, but what’s the point?” asked a younger generation of patrons at intermission. Like them, I too sat and wondered exactly how many times one can laugh at the same punchline before shifting restlessly in one’s seat. How many hammed-up curtain calls does it take before you get bored with the idea? Sure, the Trocks are wild and gorgeous and crazymad.
But, I wondered, would some subtlety not have added a dash more beauty and glamour to the occasion? Could the brazen clowning not have become subversive again – as it was off- Broadway in 1974 – if imbued with a gentler breath of irony?
Probably. It almost happened with Ida Nevasayneva’s visually radical, emotionally dysfunctional and spot-on tragicomic assault on Fokine’s Dying Swan – all the while dropping feathers like an autumn tree, then trying to stuff them back in before hogging the curtain call like the bad Anna Pavlova she’s meant to be.
But then again, pop is pop and without Patrick Swayze and the pink rand we may never have even got to see the Trocks in Johannesburg in 1998. Either way, let’s face it, there still ain’t nothing like a dame.
Les Ballets Trockadero’s first programme runs until September 12 at the Civic Theatre. Programme two runs from September 14 to 19