Faux Pas

Severe in stiffened white net and a feathered crown, Prima Ballerina Tamara Karpova delicately wafts across the stage. Rising onto her toes, she pirouettes daintily. The audience starts to giggle. If her style is classic, Karpova's form decidedly is not. No long-limbed Balanchine girl she. At 5 ft. 6 1/2 in., 160 lbs., Karpova's silhouette more closely resembles a sack of potatoes than a royal bird. The house shakes with laughter as her playmates, a brawny quartet of swans who differ vastly in shape and size, galumph through the imaginary forest. Disdainfully, the Black Rhinestone of Russian Ballet--as Karpova is called in the program notes--sinks into a deep arabesque penche, her broad washboard chest straining under her satin bodice.

Starched Tutus. Dance's new girl, it seems, is a guy--Antony Bassae. Along with the nine other "ballerinos" of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, Bassae performs in satin toe shoes and starched tutus. The Trock less than two years ago started in Manhattan Soho lofts and neighborhood shoebox theaters. This week it makes a leap into respectability with a four-night stand at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In addition to aiming choreographic broadsides at such sacred swans as George Balanchine ("Go for Barocco") and Martha Graham ("Phaedra/Monotonous"), the Trock delivers a few pointed comments on Tchaikovsky's Le Lac des Cygnes.

"What we are doing is not female impersonation," insists Primo Ballerino Bassae, 33, "it's a ballerina imitation. Nijinsky originally wanted to dance the Firebird so it's not something we discovered.

Look, the Swan Queen is not a woman, she is a bird--why can't we do Swan Lake with a man?"

Why not indeed? Yet much of the Track's success lies in the inherent shock of seeing a hefty male wrapped in a chiffon skirt dancing on point. "In Coppelia, I must be the biggest milkmaid in the world," concedes 6-ft. 2-in. Natch Taylor, 27, whose stage personae are Suzina La Fuzziovitch and Alexis Ivanovitch Lermontov.

The joke would wear thin ^ very quickly if the humor were not based on a sound knowledge of classical ballet. Working with a cartoonist's bold strokes, the Trock choreographers can come uncannily close to the original steps of the ballets they spoof. Peter Anastos, 28, (whose stage name is Olga Tchi-kaboumskaya) slyly transforms New York City Ballet's daisy chain into a spaghetti of arms and legs in his parody of Balanchine's Concerto Barocco. "Everyone who has seen Balanchine recognizes his chain of dancers weaving in and out and around each other," says Anastos. "So why not do a chain where someone gets stuck right in the middle and can't get out?" In the dazzling finale of the Corsaire pas de deux, Bassae/Karpova completes all the pirouettes and whipping one-leg turns in the traditional ver sion, then hurls his chunky body through the air and alights on his partner's shoulder in the classic manner. Most of the Trock dancers take class daily, some, like Antony Bassae who has performed male roles with German opera ballets, have conventional training and experience. Taylor studied with both Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey before taking to his toes. He maintains that any well-trained dancer should be able to go up on point. Bassae agrees: "Ballet seems always made by men for women. I think that it's a challenge to change that. When I put on a pair of toe shoes, I found out what fun it was to be a glamorous ballerina character."

Dazzling Lifts. Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo is an offspring of Manhattan's original "drag" dance troupe, Larry Ree's Trockadero Gloxinia Ballet, in which Bassae, Anastos and Taylor were members. Ironically they defected because Ree refused to permit them to take male roles. "I love partnering," says Natch Taylor, "so I was fired. Let a brilliant solo technician dazzle the audience with fancy footwork, let me dazzle with my lifts."

The new Trock impressed the New Yorker's Arlene Croce, perhaps the sternest dance critic of all. Reviewing Bassae/Karpova's performance in the Don Quixote, Croce wrote: "Karpova, I believe, gave a better performance than the Bolshoi's Nina Sorokina. There was more wit, more plasticity, more elegance and even more femininity in Karpova's balances and kneeling backbends than in all of Sorokina's tricks." The Track's recent winter season drew such eminent visitors as Jerome Robbins and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Sighed Bassae: "After 20 years of dancing I finally made it when I put on a tutu."

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