Ideas From Trent Montgomery
Trent Montgomery’s Deep Dive takes us inside his experience dancing Swan Lake en pointe and in drag with Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. Explore below to learn more about the company and the larger conversations their work opens up around ballet, gender, performance, and popular culture.
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo
The Trocks performance of Swan Lake is their most popular, twisting a centuries-old story on its head to feature an all-male identifying cast in a satirical, slapstick performance. Image courtesy: Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlp
Another Trocks performance, Pequita, is a parody of a French ballet following a Romani girl of noble birth as she saves the life of a young and handsome officer. In the Trocks version, the dangers display a range of choreographic fireworks, which strays from the rigid technique present in academic classical dance. Image courtesy: Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo
Les Sylphides is a well-known "abstract" ballet without defined characters or a narrative structure, driven forward simply by movement and Chopin's score. It's an audience favorite for its technique! Image courtesy: Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo
Return to The Handmaid's Tale
Drag in Dance
Historically, male dancers in drag have often played female characters who are evil, ugly, funny, or old. These roles are called en travesti. The travesti roles in Cinderella are the stepsisters, which opens conversations about the villainization of queer dress in popular culture. Image courtesy: Lisa Voll, Boston Ballet in Sir Frederick Ashton's Cinderella
The on-stage performance of The Nutcracker often features a dancer in drag (en travesti). Mother Ginger is a comedic character with a large tent-like skirt, out from under which several young dancers emerge. Because this role requires a significant amount of strength and height to maneuver the skirt, it is often played by a male dancer. Image courtesy: Elise Bakketun, Joshua Grant as Mother Ginger, Pacific Northwest Ballet
The standout documentary Paris is Burning (1990) captures the birthplace of voguing, a stylized dance emerging from the Harlem ballroom dance scene that mimics high-fashion posing. Image courtesy: FilmGrab
Pointe Shoes
Kadeem En Pointe (kadeem.enpointe) is an artist who defies the gender binaries of ballet by performing en pointe, something traditionally unheard of for male dancers. Here, Kadeen dances as the Black Swan outside of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Image courtesy: kadeem.enpointe via Instagram
The practice of "pancaking" pointe shoes has been a struggle amongst dancers of color for decades. It involves hand-painting shoes with a deeper shade of foundation to match one's skin tone. In recent years, some pointe shoe distributors have diversified their color options, finally relieving dancers of this tedious and expensive process. Image courtesy: malvinadecouvre via Flickr
In the 1948 film The Red Shoes, magical red pointe shoes force the main character to uncontrollably dance until her heart fails. Here, pointe shoes don't grant the wearer with body spirituality. Intsead, they strip it away. Image courtesy: Genery