‘Nutcracker’ Nation: Yes We Can!
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Published: December 8, 2010
Snow lay in piles on the sidewalks in Salt Lake City, where I saw “The Nutcracker” danced in a theater that was two years old when Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes appeared there in 1917 and that was once a vaudeville house. In Houston the next day the temperature was around 65, and “The Nutcracker” was being staged in a grand 1980s opera house next to a bayou.
In my attempt to see some two dozen productions of “The Nutcracker” from coast to coast this season, I had already seen, among others, one at Rosecliff, a 1902 mansion with a heart-shape staircase in Newport, R.I.; another in a small playhouse on the Lower East Side of Manhattan; and a third in the 1928 Boston Opera House.
As “Nutcracker” tourism this has all been gorgeous. But why does this ballet proliferate across the States more than anywhere else on the planet? What’s American here? Well, three of the versions I’ve seen have been relocated to this country. The heroine of “Nutcracker at Rosecliff” is Tess Oelrich; the Oelrichs are the original owners of Rosecliff. Act I of Washington Ballet’s production occurs in a Georgetown mansion, with Miss Liberty and John Paul Jones among Drosselmeyer’s dancing dolls. In the battle a rat version of George III fights a Nutcracker version of George Washington. That all feels like a gimmick, with too many bright ideas not well enough fitted to the music. But Act II, which is set beside a dream version of the Potomac — with female cherry blossoms dancing the Waltz of the Flowers — becomes sensuously expansive. (The company’s orchestra was playing Christmas carols outside the Warner Theater: a gentle protest against the use of taped music.)
More audacious — though far more raw in dance quality and production values — is “Nutcracker in the Lower” at the Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It runs from ballet to hip-hop, the cast is the most racially varied I’ve seen yet in a “Nutcracker” (when did anyone last see a group of black women on point in a mixed-race production?), and the emphasis is firmly multicultural.
This ballet is often staged as a little girl’s dream, but here that fantasy is unusually poignant. Clara’s father is dead, her mother works as a maid to a vain aunt, and it’s unlikely that Clara will grow up to find America a land of plenty. But in her dream, Spanish dancing (two types), belly dancing, Russian sword dancing and big ballet all coexist brightly, and the Sugar Plum Fairy is her mother, partnered by her dead father. (The pas de deux is a formal classical-tutu affair, but also more of a love duet than I’ve seen, with the dancers often locking eyes and pausing to embrace.)
The least American version so far has also been the least interesting: Ben Stevenson’s at the Houston Ballet. Here the women dance demurely, with polite Margot Fonteyn arm positions and sweetly flowing lines. Yet the characterizations of the heroine, Clara, and her brother, Fritz, are more “Me! Me! Me!” than anywhere else. In no other production have I known boys to be given toy rifles for Christmas. Clara seems merrily untroubled by the way the Nutcracker Prince seems to love her, then dump her first for the Snow Queen and then for the Sugar Plum Fairy. He’s always saying, “You must meet my wife.” And each of his wives says to Clara, “You’re my new best friend — but hands off him.”
It’s Balanchine’s version (which I saw at New York City Ballet but is also danced by companies from Miami to Oregon) that covers the greatest distance. Though his children start in Nuremberg, they travel to zones that are charged with New World speed, energy, off-balance stretch, rhythmic complexity and brilliance of sheer yes-we-can technical efficiency.
Most of these “Nutcrackers,” Balanchine’s included, place great faith in innocence as something idyllic and important. Boston Ballet, Washington Ballet and Ballet West in Salt Lake City all put vast numbers of children onstage, as does Balanchine: 83 in Boston (and a dancing bear too); and at Roseclif, the children outnumbered the adults (27 youngsters to 9 men and women). Everybody knows this makes good commercial sense: families come to see their children. But I believe American audiences love to watch children and innocence in general; Europeans are quicker to proclaim them tedious.
“How can you stand it?” people ask about my project, unaware of how individual most “Nutcrackers” are and apparently oblivious to the staggering internal diversity of Tchaikovsky’s score. Certainly there’s one bad way in which most “Nutcrackers” become much of a muchness. Too many recycle ballet clichés; the Boston and Washington Ballets are worst in this regard. How many men and women spin on one leg in the same evening? How many men do circuits of the same jumps or jump up repeatedly on the spot, legs spread wide, to touch their toes? How many times do we see the same few flashy lifts?
None of the national dances in Act II have been authentic. (How could they be, set to Tchaikovsky? Ballet West’s Arabian Dance — a very “Arabian Nights” little story — actually reveals the structure of the music better than Balanchine’s female solo to the same item.) Stereotypes certainly occur; yet most of these pseudo-ethnic dances beam with a positive American energy; several of them rightly bring the house down. Where some are regrettable is in padding them out with corny ballet tricks. Never mind ethnic (or Tchaikovsky’s) diversity, let’s make our Chinese and Russian men do the same pirouettes and jumps as our Nutcracker Prince and Sugar Plum cavalier! Let’s give the Snow Queen and the Arabian woman the same upside-down overhead acrobatic lifts!
In one exquisite — but unacknowledged — respect, most of these “Nutcrackers” are hard to tell apart. Only the Joffrey production admits that it is based on the old 1940 Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo production; the others give credit only to their own house choreographers. But much of the same Sugar Plum choreography is danced by the Colorado Ballet, Moving Island Company in Rhode Island, Boston Ballet, Washington Ballet and Houston Ballet. (That’s just to name a few; the Royal Ballet and other companies in Europe also use this choreography.) It probably all derives from the Monte Carlo version, and in the case of the adagio and ballerina solo, parts of it surely go back to the 1892 St. Petersburg original, choreographed by Lev Ivanov.
One moment in the adagio is, thrillingly, like no other in 19th-century ballet. Running to her cavalier’s arms, the Sugar Plum Fairy arrives on point with her back to us, like a closed flower: her arms raised above her head like a halo, her other leg extended high to the side. Then, keeping that leg where it is, she twists sideways and plunges her torso and an arm down (arabesque penchée croisée), as if peeling the flower open to our view. Then she returns to the vertical, but now arches back, as if stretching petals luxuriantly wide.
You can read this image as sexual, as floral or purely as a display of drastic academic contrasts. Her descent matches one of the great descending scales in Tchaikovsky’s music. I never tire of watching — and hearing — this happen.
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Published: December 8, 2010
Snow lay in piles on the sidewalks in Salt Lake City, where I saw “The Nutcracker” danced in a theater that was two years old when Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes appeared there in 1917 and that was once a vaudeville house. In Houston the next day the temperature was around 65, and “The Nutcracker” was being staged in a grand 1980s opera house next to a bayou.
In my attempt to see some two dozen productions of “The Nutcracker” from coast to coast this season, I had already seen, among others, one at Rosecliff, a 1902 mansion with a heart-shape staircase in Newport, R.I.; another in a small playhouse on the Lower East Side of Manhattan; and a third in the 1928 Boston Opera House.
As “Nutcracker” tourism this has all been gorgeous. But why does this ballet proliferate across the States more than anywhere else on the planet? What’s American here? Well, three of the versions I’ve seen have been relocated to this country. The heroine of “Nutcracker at Rosecliff” is Tess Oelrich; the Oelrichs are the original owners of Rosecliff. Act I of Washington Ballet’s production occurs in a Georgetown mansion, with Miss Liberty and John Paul Jones among Drosselmeyer’s dancing dolls. In the battle a rat version of George III fights a Nutcracker version of George Washington. That all feels like a gimmick, with too many bright ideas not well enough fitted to the music. But Act II, which is set beside a dream version of the Potomac — with female cherry blossoms dancing the Waltz of the Flowers — becomes sensuously expansive. (The company’s orchestra was playing Christmas carols outside the Warner Theater: a gentle protest against the use of taped music.)
More audacious — though far more raw in dance quality and production values — is “Nutcracker in the Lower” at the Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It runs from ballet to hip-hop, the cast is the most racially varied I’ve seen yet in a “Nutcracker” (when did anyone last see a group of black women on point in a mixed-race production?), and the emphasis is firmly multicultural.
This ballet is often staged as a little girl’s dream, but here that fantasy is unusually poignant. Clara’s father is dead, her mother works as a maid to a vain aunt, and it’s unlikely that Clara will grow up to find America a land of plenty. But in her dream, Spanish dancing (two types), belly dancing, Russian sword dancing and big ballet all coexist brightly, and the Sugar Plum Fairy is her mother, partnered by her dead father. (The pas de deux is a formal classical-tutu affair, but also more of a love duet than I’ve seen, with the dancers often locking eyes and pausing to embrace.)
The least American version so far has also been the least interesting: Ben Stevenson’s at the Houston Ballet. Here the women dance demurely, with polite Margot Fonteyn arm positions and sweetly flowing lines. Yet the characterizations of the heroine, Clara, and her brother, Fritz, are more “Me! Me! Me!” than anywhere else. In no other production have I known boys to be given toy rifles for Christmas. Clara seems merrily untroubled by the way the Nutcracker Prince seems to love her, then dump her first for the Snow Queen and then for the Sugar Plum Fairy. He’s always saying, “You must meet my wife.” And each of his wives says to Clara, “You’re my new best friend — but hands off him.”
It’s Balanchine’s version (which I saw at New York City Ballet but is also danced by companies from Miami to Oregon) that covers the greatest distance. Though his children start in Nuremberg, they travel to zones that are charged with New World speed, energy, off-balance stretch, rhythmic complexity and brilliance of sheer yes-we-can technical efficiency.
Most of these “Nutcrackers,” Balanchine’s included, place great faith in innocence as something idyllic and important. Boston Ballet, Washington Ballet and Ballet West in Salt Lake City all put vast numbers of children onstage, as does Balanchine: 83 in Boston (and a dancing bear too); and at Roseclif, the children outnumbered the adults (27 youngsters to 9 men and women). Everybody knows this makes good commercial sense: families come to see their children. But I believe American audiences love to watch children and innocence in general; Europeans are quicker to proclaim them tedious.
“How can you stand it?” people ask about my project, unaware of how individual most “Nutcrackers” are and apparently oblivious to the staggering internal diversity of Tchaikovsky’s score. Certainly there’s one bad way in which most “Nutcrackers” become much of a muchness. Too many recycle ballet clichés; the Boston and Washington Ballets are worst in this regard. How many men and women spin on one leg in the same evening? How many men do circuits of the same jumps or jump up repeatedly on the spot, legs spread wide, to touch their toes? How many times do we see the same few flashy lifts?
None of the national dances in Act II have been authentic. (How could they be, set to Tchaikovsky? Ballet West’s Arabian Dance — a very “Arabian Nights” little story — actually reveals the structure of the music better than Balanchine’s female solo to the same item.) Stereotypes certainly occur; yet most of these pseudo-ethnic dances beam with a positive American energy; several of them rightly bring the house down. Where some are regrettable is in padding them out with corny ballet tricks. Never mind ethnic (or Tchaikovsky’s) diversity, let’s make our Chinese and Russian men do the same pirouettes and jumps as our Nutcracker Prince and Sugar Plum cavalier! Let’s give the Snow Queen and the Arabian woman the same upside-down overhead acrobatic lifts!
In one exquisite — but unacknowledged — respect, most of these “Nutcrackers” are hard to tell apart. Only the Joffrey production admits that it is based on the old 1940 Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo production; the others give credit only to their own house choreographers. But much of the same Sugar Plum choreography is danced by the Colorado Ballet, Moving Island Company in Rhode Island, Boston Ballet, Washington Ballet and Houston Ballet. (That’s just to name a few; the Royal Ballet and other companies in Europe also use this choreography.) It probably all derives from the Monte Carlo version, and in the case of the adagio and ballerina solo, parts of it surely go back to the 1892 St. Petersburg original, choreographed by Lev Ivanov.
One moment in the adagio is, thrillingly, like no other in 19th-century ballet. Running to her cavalier’s arms, the Sugar Plum Fairy arrives on point with her back to us, like a closed flower: her arms raised above her head like a halo, her other leg extended high to the side. Then, keeping that leg where it is, she twists sideways and plunges her torso and an arm down (arabesque penchée croisée), as if peeling the flower open to our view. Then she returns to the vertical, but now arches back, as if stretching petals luxuriantly wide.
You can read this image as sexual, as floral or purely as a display of drastic academic contrasts. Her descent matches one of the great descending scales in Tchaikovsky’s music. I never tire of watching — and hearing — this happen.
Check out Eugene Ballet's version! They take their Nutcracker on tour to several States including Alaska and do about 32 performances!!
ResponderEliminarThaks a lot! I'll do it.
ResponderEliminar