Les Ballets Trockadero Return Featuring Guest Artist Brooke Lynn Hytes

Show One Productions presents the anticipated return of the world famous, all-male ballet company Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo (Trocks), onstage March 7, 2020 at 8pm and March 8, 2020 at 2pm and 7pm at the Winter Garden Theatre. The RuPaul's Drag Race breakout star and classically trained ballet dancer Brooke Lynn Hytes - a Trock for four years from 2008 to 2012, and a Toronto native - will make an anticipated guest appearance, dancing in all three Toronto performances. The sensational program will showcase the company's wickedly absurd antics and serious dancing chops, featuring sly send-ups of beloved ballet classics and contemporary works. Infused with a heavy dose of highbrow hilarity, this antic-laden production will offer audiences a chance to experience high-powered diva energy as the men strut their stuff in size 11 pointe shoes.

"We are thrilled to welcome the Trocks back to Toronto for a reunion with their former Canadian compatriot, Brooke Lynn Hytes, a future permanent judge on Canada's Drag Race," says Svetlana Dvoretsky, President & Executive Producer of Show One Productions. "The Trocks offer a welcome respite from our challenging times, demonstrating the best of ballet and comedy with their unique brand of unbridled positivity. Indeed, audiences always have the time of their lives at Trocks' performances. Whether they are laughing along with the company's unique rendition of ballet favourites like Swan Lake or delighting at their take on contemporary dance, audiences frequently cite the group's sensational comic timing and peerless ballet technique as the singular reason they keep coming back again and again."

The Toronto performances will include the company's perennial mainstay Swan Lake, alongside Go for Barocco, Dying Swan, and the contemporary work Walpurgisnacht, which was inspired by the Bolshoi Ballet and features music from the opera Faust. Other modern works will be announced from the stage.

Founded by a group of professional dancers in 1974, the New York-based company is dedicated to presenting lovingly crafted parodies of beloved ballet classics. Since its first performance, the company was lauded by audiences and critics alike, with rave reviews from The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Guardian. Trocks soon began a grand tradition of touring the world.

Today the Trocks have performed in more than 30 countries and 500 cities worldwide, including Amsterdam, Auckland, Barcelona, Beijing, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, London, Moscow (at the famed Bolshoi Theater), Paris (at the Chatelet Theater), Rome, Sydney, Tokyo, and Vienna.

In the four decades since the company's founding, the original concept of the Trocks has not changed. The company of male dancers performs a wide swath of classical ballet and modern dance repertoire, with careful attention paid to the detailed constructs of diverse dance styles. The Trocks re-interpret classical ballet favourites, as well as contemporary works by Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Pina Bausch, and much more.

The ensemble's legendary comedy emerges by incorporating and exaggerating the foibles, accidents, and underlying incongruities of serious dance. The fact that men dance all the parts - bodies delicately balancing en pointe as swans, sylphs, water sprites, romantic princesses, and angst-ridden Victorian ladies - enhances, rather than mocks, the spirit of dance as an art form, delighting and amusing both dance connoisseurs and novice audiences alike.

Brooke Lynn Hytes (Brock Hayhoe) trained at the National Ballet School of Canada before joining the Trocks as a principal ballerina in 2008. She left the Trocks in 2012 to pursue drag full-time. In 2014, she won the coveted Miss Continental crown in the US and in 2019 became the first Canadian to appear on RuPaul's Drag Race. She finished as first runner-up of Season 11.

Tickets from $35 at ticketking.com.

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