DANCE REVIEW : The Trocks Make a Stop at UCI

Finding new repertory has long been a challenge for the 15-year-old parody-drag ballet troupe Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo.

Unfortunately, Ann Marie D’Angelo’s “In Kazmidity” (set to Delibes and given its company West Coast premiere Friday at UC Irvine’s Bren Events Center), falls more into the mindless-skit category than into the Trocks’ usual dead-on parodies of icons of the dance world.

Created in 1982 for the Joffrey II Dancers, the work ventures the story of buglike creatures, the Kazmites--”souls of unfulfilled ballerinas”--who abduct a young man to initiate him into their realm.

The two-scene ballet offers a sendup of mime conventions, bad partnering, prima-ballerina attitudes and out-of-sync members of the corps. But the piece also is busy and skittish, effects are labored and narrative elements early on are not clear--although perhaps the problem was the hall’s bad sight lines.

The humor was largely carried by the vivacious, manhunting Queen of the Kazmites, danced by Nina Enimenimynimova (a.k.a. Victor Trevino), who contributed a final, dazzling flourish of lunatic, embellished fouettes .

As one of her court, Babushkina (alias James O’Connor-Taylor) also offered a delicious cameo of burlesque-queen antics.

Far funnier and more inventive, both in dance and dance-parody terms, was Natch Taylor’s “Gambol,” danced Friday with the newly choreographed final movement of Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata, not seen when the work was given its Los Angeles premiere last year.

The addition continues the satire of post-modernism, with dancers running in endless, diagonal leaps and bounds, plus a hilarious section in which one hopscotches over the others--all tied relentlessly to the beat in the most wicked music-visualization imaginable.

Roy Fialkow’s “I Wanted to Dance With You at the Cafe of Experience” (music by Carlos Gardel) may be the ultimate modern dance in which a cafe is the setting for personal, social and political Angst. Adam Baum (Tory Dubrin) was the languid narcissist; Natasha Notgoudenoff (Mike Gonzales), the tortured, depressed lover.

Also on the program: “Isadora Deconstructed,” choreographed by Duncan scholar Lori Belilove and danced with skill and loving giddiness by Enimenimynimova.