BALLET REVIEW : Trockadero Goes Postmodern With ‘Gambol’

Since its inception 14 years ago, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo has always deliriously pursued a rhinestone-and-goosefeathers aesthetic, wallowing comically in the florid glamour of classical ballet while occasionally deigning to embrace the icons of early modern dance.

In Natch Taylor’s “Gambol,” however, the company goes postmodern--with a vengeance.

Introduced Wednesday at the James A. Doolittle Theatre on a largely familiar program of one-act Trock frivolities, this new, neo-Expressionist divertissement represents a comprehensive anthology of the Euro-trash littering our stages lately, unified by those de rigueur elements: a heavyweight Germanic score (Beethoven, no less) and a contemptuous, pearls-before-swine performance style.

It begins with pedestrian movement performed by a platoon of sullen Trock-dancers in street clothes and soon incorporates sarcastic quotations from pop dance (a lobotomized Susie-Q) and passages of wildly excessive female suffering--both the hallmarks of Pina-servitude.

There are also spasms of furioso classical technique in the meaty Neumeier/Forsythe style beloved of Hamburgers and Frankfurters--and some of the ghastliest lifts in world dance.

You like staggering masses, cruciform poses, apocalyptic glances at the sky and lots of eye liner? It’s all here, and more. “Gambol” misses nothing, not the dead-end structuralism, the chic pictorialism, the smug chumminess. It is perhaps the most clever and incisive Trockadero vehicle since “Yes, Virginia, Another Piano Ballet.”

Certainly, it uses the company’s growing dance prowess more astutely than Betteanne Terrell’s “The Four Seasons” (music by Verdi), a broad, predictable lampoon of those silly 19th-Century opera interludes that major ballet companies have unearthed recently in an attempt to wring more novelties from the Romantic era.

Improbably festooned with icicles, bells, leaves, petals and fruit, Charles B. Slackman’s costumes prove the main attraction--though Ludmila Bolshoya (a k a Rusty Curcio) delivers powerful pique turns as Queen of the Harvest and Karina Grudj (alias Allen Dennis) slinks majestically through his solo as Summer’s Last Rose.

The program also includes a double dose of Swan plumage--”Swan Lake” and “The Dying Swan,” each more strongly danced than ever but deteriorating from a curious failure of imagination.

In the past, prima ballerinas in these Trock signature works used to conjure up a vision--comically distorted but still recognizable--of the expressive traditions coloring these much-abused classics.

Unfortunately, Bolshoya and Felina Goudolova (Thom McLean) seem to know only the steps and the gags. They work hard for laughs, but the joke is now always about men clumping around on point. And that can’t sustain an entire act--much less an evening.