Sunday, November 1st, 2009
OUT OF THEIR SHELLS
BY JACQUELINE DETWILER
This holiday season at concert halls throughout the land, audiences will watch, rapt, as little Claras in nightgowns dream as they have for centuries, of nutcracker princes, malevolent mice and beribboned sugar plums in pointe shoes— never mind that, in 2009, most nuts come de-shelled, an exterminator can take care of that mouse problem and 99 percent of children don’t know what a sugar plum tastes like. For years, the Claras have persisted, transporting audiences to perfect Bavarian Christmas scenes that can’t help but seem unreal to people who live in city apartments, with foster parents or in places where it doesn’t snow. But this year, a couple of Claras (and in one case, a Clarice) are having dreams that may be a little closer to our own. And whether they incorporate new forms of dance or are set here in the U.S., the dreams of these new Claras are bringing the classic ballet some modern admirers.
Originally choreographed in 1892, The Nutcracker is such a revered holiday tradition that it’s rarely seen as a malleable work of art. Most ballet companies stage a marginally stylized version and perform it the same way year after year. Even across companies, the ballet follows an easily recognizable narrative: Clara’s (in some versions, Marie’s) parents host a party where a mysterious uncle gives her a soldier-shaped nutcracker who turns into a prince, saves her from a band of diabolical mice and takes her on a magical journey to a land of sweets, presided over by the ballet’s principal dancer, the Sugar Plum Fairy.
“The story is why people come. You don’t want to fix what’s not broken,” says Anthony Williams, artistic director of Boston’s BalletRox, one group that has found a way to incorporate new elements while maintaining the conventions that draw audiences. “But it’s like ice cream. You have strawberry over and over, and eventually you go to the store and you want to try something new.”
For BalletRox, that something new turned out to be step teams, double-dutch jump rope groups and even an Irish ensemble performing alongside the cast of traditional ballerinas. Since he first choreographed a new version of the holiday classic in 2001, Williams has kept an eye on the cultural dance groups that regularly appear around Boston, and each year asks several of them to join the show.
“I do it because BalletRox is in this very racially and socioeconomically diverse part of Boston,” Williams says. “So I have all these kids doing these different types of dance and I always want to get them all on stage. In the end, the show really moves people because you have all these bodies up there: thin dancers, big dancers, black dancers, Hispanic dancers. It’s very inspiring.”
Showcasing a more diverse selection of dancers wasn’t enough for Williams, however. In BalletRox’s recent version of the ballet, Clara’s name has been updated to Clarice, and her home life reflects living situations that are often pushed under the rug in happy holiday shows. She’s had a single mother, for instance, and last year, her father was stationed in Iraq. “He’s this absent figure for most of the ballet, and then at the very end, when Clarice wakes up, he comes home. That scene really brought tears to a lot of people’s eyes, because it was so current,” Williams says.
Current events of a different sort are the focus of the Olympic Performance Group’s new Nutcracker. The Bainbridge Island, Wash. (a 35-minute ferry ride from Seattle)-based company noticed the popularity of televised dance shows like “Dancing With the Stars” and “America’s Best Dance Crew,” and attempted to bring a more complete sample of dance to its audience, a group which is much more educated about the art form than audiences before them.
“People see these shows on TV, so they already know there’s more to dance than ballet. We try to bring the nontraditional, the off-the-wall,” says Alex Ung, a hip-hop instructor for the affiliated Bainbridge Ballet. Ung danced the role of hip-hop marionette in last year’s production, one of the roles that was modified to bring in more contemporary moves. The company even replaced the ballet’s most recognizable character, the Sugar Plum Fairy, with a jazzy flapper girl known as Sweet Tart.
Not surprisingly, audiences have responded very well to the new version, which includes hip-hop dance battles, break dancing and lyrical modern pieces, like those by Mia Michaels on “So You Think You Can Dance.” “People love it,” Ung says. “People are very familiar with The Nutcracker name, but they come and see something that’s a little different and it makes them open up to the whole dance world.”
And seeing these different forms of dance live has led to a positive change in at least one demographic: young boys who are thinking of pursuing a traditionally woman-dominated art form. “I’ve had a lot of boys come in who are really excited to try out hip-hop dance after going,” Ung says.
When Sadie Harris first saw The Nutcracker, she couldn’t help imagining what it would feel like to be the Sugar Plum Fairy. She could see that it was a difficult role to perform, with quick petite allegro sections and tricky partner work, and once she landed the role with the Nashville Ballet, she was as excited as ever. But soon after, she realized that the role had changed.
For the Nashville Ballet, updating The Nutcracker had less to do with showcasing modern forms of dance—the production is still 100 percent classical ballet—and more to do with making the magic of the story more accessible, by grounding it in an event that locals, especially kids, are likely to remember from history classes.
Although it’s still set in the same time period as the original, Nashville Ballet’s Wizard of Oz-esque version begins in the sepia-toned Tennessee of historical photos, when Clara attends the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition with her parents and is shocked to see international people and foods that she has never encountered before. These same characters inhabit her later dream, creating a calland- response scenario that makes sense of the storyline for kids.
“A lot of people come to the ballet for the first time to see The Nutcracker, and there are a lot of things about ballet that people don’t understand, so it was important to mix the storytelling and the magic and all these Tennessee details in with the pointe work,” says Paul Vasterling, artistic director of the Nashville Ballet, “so even people who aren’t really into ballet can enjoy what’s going on.”
But by updating the classic, Vasterling has done more than just make the ballet more exciting for children. Locals of all ages who come to see the production see more of themselves reflected in an art form that is notoriously stodgy and high-minded. From a prologue set in Nashville’s Shelby Bottoms Park to mini- Andrew Jacksons in the Nutcracker’s army, the Nashville Ballet Nutcracker speaks to its Southern audience in a more authentic way than the original, Bavarian-inspired version.
“I think if I had seen this version when I was a kid, and I had grown up in Nashville, I would have been even more excited to be a part of it,” Harris says. “All the stuff that Clara sees in her real life gets reflected later on [in her dream]. Like in the battle scene, all the soldiers are on little pole horses: It’s what a child would imagine a battle would be like. It’s amazing that a child’s imagination can take off like that, but it really happens.”
You can see it happening in the eyes of the children in the audience, when recognizable Nashville cityscapes are filled with dancing bears, living candies and magical snowflakes.
And when Harris takes her final bow in the Bellmeade Mansion (a real Nashville landmark), and a ballerina at BalletRox finally reunites with her military dad, a new generation of children will go home to their own dreams, visions of sugar plums break dancing in their heads.
