All-male Trockaderos ballet injects comedy with graceful masculinity

There are two things you will be getting at a performance by Les Ballets Trockaderos de Monte Carlo: excellent ballet dancing and a lot of fun, in that order.

“When we do, for example, ‘Swan Lake,’ we only add the comedy,” said Raffaele Morra, dancer and ballet master for the all-male company, which performs Sunday at Hawaii Theatre. “We might change a few steps, but mostly because we want to give space for the comedy as well. Sometimes we have to change something to make it funnier, but that’s really the only time we change the steps.”

It doesn’t take much to make ballet funny, but it doesn’t look easy. Take, for example, the scene when the beautiful duet of “Le Corsaire” is interrupted because the slave girl Medora gets spun around a bit too hard by the pirate Conrad, prompting a near-tumbling yet surprisingly graceful pass across the stage, followed by an angry glare.

THE COMPANY has been entertaining ballet and nonballet lovers alike for 40 years, with similarly perilous parodies of pas de deux and en pointe expertise. These men don’t lose their balance, no matter how large their slippers.

“It’s not just the now very refined way that the men dance en pointe, it is the absolute command they have of their artistry, serious artistry,” wrote Ismene Brown of The Spectator of London in a recent review.

Morra was a dancer for a company in his native Turino, Italy, primarily performing in contemporary dance styles that “were interesting for us but maybe not so much for the audience,” before seeing a live performance and deciding to join the company in 2001.

“I was really surprised by, first of all, the high quality,” he said. “The standard was really high in the dancing, and definitely the comedy aspect interested me. But the audience reaction really took me by surprise. I rarely see an audience so enthusiastic at a ballet performance. Not only because we’re having fun, but they left the theater that night willing to see more.”

These days, “Trocks,” as the dancers like to call themselves, are less likely to have come from other dance troupes, but directly from the academies that train dancers for the conventional ballet companies.

“People 18, 19 years old, their first job is Trockaderos,” Morra said. “We already have guys lined up in schools who want to be part of the company.”

It takes an unusual kind of dancer to perform with Trockaderos, Morra said. For one thing, they have to learn to dance female roles, which usually takes a few months working with the company. Ultimately, it becomes like installing “a chip in the brain,” Morra said. What it does not become, however, is dancing like a girl.

“We are dancing roles that are typically danced by girls, but we still dance as men, just dressed as a ballerina,” Morra said. “We dance with the same attack, the same strength, the same power of a male dancer. … We don’t want the audience to forget that we are men.”

These days, male dancers are just as flexible as women, able to perform everything from en pointe maneuvers on arched feet to full splits. “We don’t have flexibility issues anymore,” he said.

Dancing with the Trocks also requires the ability “to laugh at ourselves,” Morra said. “I know a lot of really, really great dancers, and they couldn’t do what we do. It’s very difficult to learn something and then forget about it because you want to make people laugh. We need to break the rules of classical ballet without forgetting what classical ballet needs to be. ”

IN PERFORMANCE here the Trockaderos will perform excerpts from several full-length ballets, including the second act of “Swan Lake.” Morra said their “campy” version serves as an excellent introduction to “white ballet” — a term referring to the dancers’ attire in white tutus — while also displaying the storytelling aspect of ballet.

“A lot of people have told me, ‘I never understood what “Swan Lake” is about until I saw your version,’” he said.

And did the film “Black Swan” change their presentation at all? “No, maybe we affected ‘Black Swan,’ but they didn’t affect us,” Morra said with a laugh.

Other selections include a section from the ballet “Napoli,” with choreography based on Danish choreographer August Bournonville’s original setting. “He really created a style all his own,” Morra said. “The Royal Danish Ballet still does ballet by Bournonville, so we can say this is a Danish style of ballet, only of course done by the Trocks.”

They’ll also do a “secret” that Morra said will be well known to Trocks fans but that he wanted to keep as a surprise for newcomers, a section of “Le Corsaire” and a one-act version of “Don Quixote,” adapted from George Balanchine’s choreography.

“The dancing has improved so much,” Morra said. “We are an established company. We can perform anywhere, from the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow to a bullfighting ring” (which they’ve done, in the Canary Islands).

“The most important thing is that we are very good show for the entire family,” he said. “If you just describe what we do as a company, it might be considered not suitable for kids. This is not the case. We are really, really good for a young audience.”