E-Mail This Article to a Friend Irina Bakpakova? Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo are back in Boston BY IRIS FANGER

It’s a giggle just reading the program notes for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, the all-male company that has a repertory filled with send-ups of ballet and modern-dance classics. The 16 performers have taken such stage names as Lariska Dumbchenko and Ida Nevasayneva and have written bios to match. For example: "Any balletgoer who saw Irina Bakpakova dancing on a herring in her first American tour is not likely to forget her outstanding performance as the Sour Cream Fairy."

Les Ballets Trockadero appear next weekend at the Cutler Majestic Theatre on a program that includes their signature work, act two of Swan Lake, plus Le Grand Pas de Quatre, a 19th-century ballet created by Jules Perrot for four of the leading ballerinas of the Romantic era, and Raymonda’s Wedding, which is based loosely — better believe it — on the Petipa work that premiered in St. Petersburg in 1898. Other works in the Trockadero repertory but not on the Boston program include George Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes, 19th-century Danish choreographer August Bournonville’s Flower Festival Pas de Deux, a work inspired by Pina Bausch, and Merce Cunningham’s Cross-Currents (this one was suggested by the choreographer). Although the versions adopted by the Trocks, as they’re affectionately known, are guffaw-inducing in poking fun at the overwrought emotions of ballerinas-turned-into-swans, the works have been staged with impeccable attention to the actual choreography and traditions that accompany it, not to mention a high level of technique.

Founded in 1974, when they first performed in the downtown lofts of New York, Les Ballets Trockadero comprise trained dancers who were members of regular ballet companies before changing the tone of their careers. The men — who work on year-around contracts complete with health insurance (not a given in the dance world) — tour nearly 40 weeks a year to countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia as well as the United States, where they are regulars on the university circuit. The annual summer dates in Japan have brought them their own fan club. "It’s a good job if you like to travel," says artistic director Tory Dobrin. "We never hold auditions. The person that wants to be with us finds us."

The fact that the Trocks perform en travesti as men taking women’s roles in women’s clothing merely expands a theatrical tradition dating back to the ancient Greek theater of Athens. And Dobrin — who trained at the Harkness Ballet school and danced with the Dallas Ballet, American Dance Machine, and the ballet company at Radio City Music Hall before joining the Trocks in 1980 — is emphatic about the anatomical flexibility of men’s feet in pointe shoes. "God gave everybody the feet they need to support their weight. We’re not trying to dance like women. We’re trying to dance like men in toe shoes." Dobrin does acknowledge that dancing on pointe is difficult. "They just handed me a pair of pointe shoes and I put them on. If you’re afraid of it, you can never do it. It does take about a year to figure it out."

Despite the hilarity of their nightly performances, the Trocks’ history is marked by the loss of troupe members to AIDS. The company appears in many annual benefits for international AIDS organizations, and it dedicates its performances to the memory of all Trocks who have died of AIDS and other causes.

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo perform January 16 through 18 at the Cutler Majestic Theatre, 219 Tremont Street in the Theater District. Tickets are $37 to $52; call (800) 447-7400 or go to www.Telecharge.com.