Comedy dance troupe Les Ballets Trockadero De Monte Carlo return to Bradford this week

They rolled the dice on bringing a world renowned dance company to the city. Such companies come with high price tickets and, very long story short, the decision placed the theatre on an unsteady financial footing because audiences did not support the decision and stayed away when the dance company came.

Two decades ago Adam Renton, the man then in charge of the Alhambra, rolled the dice again and decided he would bring dance back to Bradford. Renton must be a hell of a poker player. As audiences once again started coming to see dance at the theatre in small numbers, he backed his decision to the hilt without blinking.

Fast forward two decades and today dance is a huge pull to the Bradford Alhambra with the likes of Rambert, Alvin Ailey and, this week, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo all coming to the theatre.

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, or The Trocks to give them their more informal, more manageable name, don’t match the likes of Rambert in terms of quality of dancing, but that doesn’t mean the company is any less world class.

“It’s comedy ballet. What does that mean? Well, it means that the performers are men, they are comedians and they are ballet dancers. They are all three. It is most important to us that the audience have fun and enjoy it as a comedy piece. But then, perhaps as they walk away from the theatre, think ‘actually, that dancing was really proficient’,” says Tory Dobrin, The Trocks’ artistic director.

When we speak Dobrin is in his hotel in London where The Trocks are at the beginning of a seventeenth national tour of the UK.

It’s an impressive feat for a show that began in downtown New York in 1974 as a drag act in the wake of the Stonewall Riots.

Since then the company has won fans across the world with its hilarious parodies of the conventions of classical ballet. While that is inherently amusing, there is also a message underneath the comedy, with The Trocks a company that, it says, wants to share a message of inclusion and equality, providing a stage for dancers often under-represented in ballet, due to either sexual orientation, gender identity, size, class or ethnicity.

This current tour of The Trocks is the sixth presented by the Dance Consortium, a collection of theatres that joined forces in 2000 to use their collective power to bring otherwise prohibitively expensive dance shows to the UK.

“The director of the theatre there in Bradford, Adam, has been part of the Dance Consortium since the very early days. It’s great because we love bringing what we do to the city and the audiences are incredibly enthusiastic,” says Dobrin.

“Plus the city has great Indian food,” he adds, somewhat unexpectedly for an American. “We do have Indian food in the US, but it just doesn’t taste as good as it does in Bradford.”

Since the last visit of The Trocks to Bradford, the city has been awarded UK City of Culture status for 2025. Dobrin has heard the news and says he was pleased but not entirely surprised by the news: “Whenever we have been to the city, audiences have always come out to support us.”

So what exactly is The Trocks? Well, if you haven’t got a handle yet, you will see some genuinely impressive dance and you will, according to Dobrin, equally laugh your tutus off.

“To be stereotypical for a moment, I would say you may have a wife who enjoys ballet and her husband who doesn’t enjoy ballet, but likes comedy, the show is for both of them,” says Dobrin.

The company’s 16 dancers all have the kinds of names you might associate with a drag show – there’s a Minnie Van Driver in there – and in the current tour present programmes featuring classical ballets from Le Lac des Cygnes to Raymonda’s Wedding.

“The UK has always been an important country for us to tour, because there’s something about audiences in the UK that just get our work. I think it’s because they are used to a tradition of pantomime and boisterous theatre,” says Dobrin. Plus, in Bradford, we really appreciate world class dance.

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, Bradford Alhambra, October 14 and 15.