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“There’s nothing more tedious than watching the same thing all night long,” says Tory Dobrin, artistic director of , the all-male drag ballet company making its triumphant return to Detroit this fall. It will be the first U.S. stop on a 20-city international tour.

The company, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, will perform at the on Nov. 23 and 24, alongside the Detroit Opera Orchestra led by conductor Beatrice Jona Affron.

In Trockadero performances, male dancers perform roles traditionally danced by women — en pointe and in tutus, a nearly unheard-of rarity (if not a downright impossibility) in the classical ballet world.

But for half a century now, the Trocks, as they’re familiarly known, have maintained a seemingly unattainable balance between parody and humor, on the one hand, and highly skilled, precisely delineated classical technique, on the other.

“We try to have lots of different kinds of comedy; lots of different types of ballets; lots of different types of music, costuming, and personalities onstage,” Dobrin says. “We just throw the whole gamut at the audience.”

In Detroit, the Trocks will perform selections from Swan Lake, The Dying Swan, and Balanchine’s Tarantella, among others, toying with gender roles and stereotypes as they go.

In the Trocks’ version, for instance, Odette, from Swan Lake, whose role is traditionally performed by a female dancer, is depicted as a “Margaret Thatcher-like character — there’ll be no fooling with her,” Dobrin says.

Of the dancers who make up the company, Dobrin says, “Some are very short, some are huge, and some are skinny.”

That’s in stark opposition to both classical ballet and modern dance companies, which tend to hire dancers of an exclusively thin or slight build; in addition, dancers of color frequently face difficulty in finding contracts.

As a whole, Dobrin says, the Trocks represent “a very wide segment of the human race, which you don’t find so often in a ballet company.”

But the Trocks have been upending convention since the early 1970s, when the troupe was first begun.

“Believe me,” Dobrin says, “they never thought it was going to last 50 years.”

In their early years, while the Trocks found a faithful, dedicated audience, critics and staunch ballet traditionalists remained unimpressed. In the decades since, Trock dancers have only gained in technical proficiency, taking on selections from more and more difficult ballets.

But for Dobrin, the focus has always been on the audience.

“We want the audience to come expecting to have a good time, and we want them to leave having had a good time,” he says. “And also being really impressed with how incredibly good the dancing is.”

This story originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of ����vlog��׿��. To read more, pick up a copy of ����vlog��׿�� Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our will be available on Sept. 6.