Let’s hear it for Art! And let’s hear it, loud and proud, for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo – the globe-trotting troupe of all-male ballerinas who take Art on a giddy gallop through comedy capers and glam camp that is, in effect, a tour-de-force celebration of classic dance. For even as the Trocks (as they’re affectionately known world-wide) are putting their foot in it – with swan-maidens toppling like nine-pins while Prince Siegfried louche-ly ruffles the feathers of Odette – that foot is in a pointe-shoe, delivering a command of technique that any major ballet company would sign up in a jiffy, if the dancer in the tutu wasn’t sprouting visible chin and chest hair.

Back in the early days of the Trocks, the shows in crowded New York lofts were decidedly heavy on the burlesque spoofery that forty years on is still a signature strand of the programming. But something else kept audiences coming back, intrigued because the guys in tutus could turn out proper pointe-work. By subverting gender conventions and setting ballerina choreographies on male bodies, the Trocks were pin-pointing the necessary steel, strength and stamina that keeps a Sylph, or a Swan Princess, securely on her toes. Here was the melding of prowess and grace that Pavlova, Makarova, Fonteyn had made the stuff of legend – the Trocks were inspired to follow in their footsteps. They just also tripped up occasionally, just for fun.

Today the laughs still come thick and fast, but over the years the Trocks have also solicitously tended the flame that once flared so extravagantly in the realm of the Imperial Russian ballet. They cite Petipa – the acknowledged Father of the Russian ballet – as their artistic guru, and his influence goes well beyond the cod-Rooshian names of the dancers, or the period style affected on-stage: it manifests in a repertoire that revives long-neglected works that other companies regard as too old-fashioned or unfamiliar. Talk to anyone involved with the Trocks – from the artistic director, Tory Dobrin, to the wardrobe assistant stuffing feathers into the Dying Swan’s moult-ready tutu – and they will all tell you that yes, what they do is drag but even within the comedy, it’s always been about the love of dance. That dance, ultimately, is no joke but the seriously researched, technically challenging real deal.

Currently on tour in the UK – with Edinburgh and Inverness on their schedule next week – the Trocks soon prove that that is no idle boast. Morning class, afternoon rehearsals, performances at night plus the bondage of the pointe-shoe, with its particular demands on balance and musculature – it’s not a easy regime. So why be a Trock?

When Philip Martin-Nielson says, with a wry little smile: “Ballet saved my life...” then adds that he wouldn’t be doing so many things that most people take for granted if it wasn’t for the Trocks, the temptation is to think “uh-oh! drama queen alert!” The truth, which Martin-Nielson volunteers with unhistrionic candour, makes that half-thought blush with embarrassed shame.

At the age of three, Martin-Nielson was diagnosed as profoundly autistic – unable to speak, make eye contact with others or focus on the simplest task. He was withdrawn, couldn’t bear to be touched.

“I was like this,” he says, hunching into himself, arms crossed protectively in front of his chest, and rocking silently back and forth, back and forth. He straightens up: a disarmingly charming, affable and good-looking lad in his early twenties who now has the world at his feet, touring with the Trocks.

He continues: “The doctors told my mother I would never be able to live any kind of independent life – they’d even brought the papers for her to sign for me to go into institutional care. So many autistic children – given the same diagnostic status as me – get locked away into institutionalised lives and never have the chance to find themselves. I was very lucky. My mother decided to keep me, to fight for me, find the right therapies, the right environments.

"But I already knew inside myself, even if I couldn’t say it out loud. I knew I wanted to – needed to – dance. And here I am!”

So too is Nadia Doumiafeyva, the blonde ballerina he morphs into before going on-stage – he reckons she’s a bit of a bossy-boots who likes things to be just so.

“She would, yes, be in charge of the cheer-leader squad, designing their costumes, organising their make-up, choreographing their routines. Onstage, herself, Miss Nadia is not afraid to show what she can do!” Miss Nadia, it so happens, can do a very great deal with classy aplomb – bringing a mischievous irony to her surname of Doumiafeyva (say it out loud – then imagine the sassy New Yorker shrug in Martin-Nielson’s voice).

When it comes to his acquired technique, he’ll own the effort and conviction he put into training,but he’ll freely credit teachers, the Ukrainian-born Natasha Bar especially, not just for seeing he had talent but for believing he had the determination to push through the barriers of his autism and succeed as a dancer.

“Natasha was a very big influence,” he says. “She was able to bring out qualities in me that I knew I could bring to a female aesthetic. She was very precise, very tasteful in what she did – and she taught with a Russian style, but with an American speed, and that helps a lot with how the Trocks do things as well.”

Long before he graduated from the School of American Ballet, Martin-Nielsen had the Trocks in his sights. Gut instincts again, coupled with a bit of chutzpah.

“I took it upon myself to e-mail Tory [Dobrin], sent him my resume. I auditioned, he liked me... but at 17, I was too young. I could, however, take class with the Trocks when they were in town.”

There’s a twinkly pause. “A couple of days before my graduation, Tory presented me with my contract. I was so glad, so excited. It’s one of the reasons I speak openly about my autism. There are countless children, locked away from who are they are because of their autism – ballet unlocked that cage for me. It could happen for them, if they get the chance, and the support, to pursue what they love.”

Along the corridor, summoning up that indefatigable diva, Olga Supphozova, is Robert “Bobby” Carter – in everyday life a study in dapper elegance, given to flashes of diamond bling even in rehearsal sweats. Carter turned 40 at the beginning of the year, not that he looks it either off-stage or on. For half of his life, he’s been with the Trocks – dancing on pointe in roles like Odile (the Black Swan) that are, he says, “the benchmarks in a ballerina’s career all over the world."

"Her status in a company – with audiences, with critics – is defined by how she performs in them. It’s not really any different for a Trock. If anything, I’d say there were more challenges in what we do because of the comedy. You have to be able, and willing, to act like the class clown – but then to rise to the technical demands of the pointe-work with as much precision and expression as any of the legends who originally created the role. And you know all about them, believe me, because, as a Trock, whether you are on tour or not, you are obsessed by what you love. And that’s ballet.”

He will laugh, recalling his childhood self going to dance classes in Charleston.

“I was fascinated by the pointe shoes. I’d say to the girls: 'Don't throw your old ones away, give them to me!’ That love affair with pointe-shoes is still with me – and Olga wouldn’t have it any other way, either!” He sees Olga, and her presence on-stage – “she has to be only diva on-stage” he jokes – as an intrinsic part of his finesse as a dancer and an artist. Their first encounter came with the choosing of her wig.

“I knew she was a high-maintenance blonde, strong-willed like me,” he says, but he also knew she was the entry-point into the ballerina roles he longed to dance, and has danced with bravura panache ever since. As for Art – well Olga declares, in her programme biog, that whatever she’s done she “did it for Art's sake." The typical Trock payoff follows: Art said nothing however.

Indeed, the Trocks can leave you speechless.

Olga, Nadia and the Trocks give Art a whirl at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre on Tuesday and Wednesday, and at Eden Court in Inverness on Friday.

www.trockadero.org