Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo—known affectionately as the Trocks—have been gleefully upending ballet’s solemn conventions since their founding in New York City in 1974. An all-male troupe performing en pointe, the company is famous for sending up the grand classical repertoire while executing it with technical rigor.
When the Trocks arrive at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, for two performances on Saturday, February 7 (3pm and 8pm), the engagement will double as something of a homecoming—at least for one member of the cast. Vincent Brewer, who joined the company a year and a half ago, grew up in Great Barrington and trained locally at Berkshire Pulse and Albany Berkshire Ballet. His parents still live in town, and many of his former teachers, friends, and colleagues are expected to be in the audience.
The Trocks were founded as a kind of affectionate insurgency. Performing under elaborate pseudonyms—each dancer has both a ballerina and danseur persona—the company parodies the melodrama, rivalries, and excesses of 19th-century ballet. But the joke has always rested on deep respect for the form. The dancers are classically trained, the choreography is demanding, and the pointe work is real. “We take it very seriously,” Brewer says. “We work so hard at the ballet, and then we also work so hard at the comedy too. That fusion is really what makes the company shine.”
Brewer’s own path to the Trocks has been anything but conventional. Before joining the company, he danced professionally with several ballet troupes, then pivoted during the pandemic to teaching French at Taconic High School in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. When live performance shut down, he returned to school and assumed teaching might be his future. On a whim—and with a long-standing admiration for the Trocks—he sent in audition materials. He was accepted two weeks before the 2024 school year was set to begin. “I packed my bags and went off to New York City,” Brewer says.
His introduction to pointe work came years earlier, when a ballet director cast him as an LGBTQ Sugar Plum Fairy in Boston’s “Urban Nutcracker.” That experience opened the door to the kind of expressive range the Trocks encourage. “I love that you can have so many different kinds of expression in the company,” Brewer says. “It felt like a dream company.”
Onstage, Brewer performs under the name Moussia Shebarkarova, a ballerina whose backstory includes a comically long correspondence-school ballet education, and as one of the Legupski brothers, a recurring Trocks clan known for their swagger in elaborate costumes. These characters are part of the company’s long-running internal mythology. “We’re the new incarnation of the Legupski brothers,” Brewer says. While the framework is inherited, each dancer finds ways to inflect roles with personal physicality and timing.
That timing—comic and musical—is central to the Trocks’ appeal. Rehearsals weave together technical precision and carefully choreographed slapstick. “We’ll work on the steps, and then when a specific joke is supposed to happen, we stop and work out the physical choreography for it,” Brewer explains. The company recently spent nearly a week training with mime specialists to refine their physical comedy, underscoring how seriously the humor is taken.
At the Mahaiwe, the program will feature four staples of the Trocks repertoire, including “Swan Lake” and “La Bayadere,” alongside the iconic “Dying Swan” solo and a flamboyant finale from “Paquita,” complete with Spanish flair and ornate tutus. For first-time audiences, the laughs come fast—but so do the details. Glances, wobbles, and exaggerated flourishes often land in passing, rewarding close attention.
After five decades, the joke hasn’t worn thin. Brewer attributes that longevity to craft. “They really know how to time it,” he says. “It’s about telling a story with your body.” For a dancer who grew up in the Berkshires and trained in earnest classical technique, returning home with the Trocks means bringing both sides of that equation—discipline and delight—back to the stage where it all began.
