Audiences love transvestites, particularly when they wear tutus. Les Ballets Trockadero have become a worldwide hit with their gender-bending spoofs of well-known ballets, and in doing so have highlighted some of the genre's often-overlooked absurdities. Why, they ask, must the members of the corps de ballet be identical? Why can't the dancers look exhausted or pissed off? Why are we expected to understand gestures that were invented by 19th-century aristocrats? The Trocks, however, don't trash the form in their marathon performances. Their astounding expertise as dancers pays respect to ballet as well as conveying its peculiarities.
What is clever about the Trocks' mixed programming is that they warm up the audience with the most obvious gags and leave the subtleties to the end. The second act of Swan Lake, which opened the evening at the Peacock, is their signature tune in which the ballerina is dropped, cues are missed, the order of steps flunked, and mood swings are experienced by all of the dancers. Paquita, which closed the show, is an impressive show of technique, with the odd bit of humour effectively juxtaposed, as when a dancer flexes her muscles in the middle of a solo, or another appears wearing glasses.
It is in Cross Currents, an austere trio originally made by Merce Cunningham in 1964, that the dancers really display their skill as comedians. Three dancers with 60s floppy hairstyles wearing Cunningham's trademark unitards join two earnest musicians on stage. They immediately capture the starkness of this brand of contemporary dance, which operates on tricky timings, internally felt rhythms and live improvisation by the musicians in the style of John Cage. Here campness and theatricality are stripped away as the dancers illustrate the strange aesthetics of the Cunningham vocabulary - robotic back bends, stiff penguin arms and sudden changes of direction - with glassy concentration. The musicians, in turn, parody the sporadic noises of conceptual music, using a bizarre array of everyday objects with absolute seriousness - toothbrushes, hair spray, scissors, paper, wrapping plastic.
In contrast, Yes, Virginia, Another Piano Ballet (choreographed by former Trock Peter Anastos), is a send up of the easy-going, accessible piano ballet, where the dancers are meant to be simple happy folk relating to each other. In the Trocks' version, the "women" are a bitchy, competitive group, while the men are sadistic bullies, who can't stand their simpering partners.
As is the habit of transvestites, the Trocks "perform" women better than they do men, but what is interesting is how close some of the men playing the parts of principal ballerinas are to the real thing.
In rep till September 25. Box office: 0171-863 8222
