Thinking About The Nutcracker
New York City Ballet: The Nutcracker
New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC
November 28, 2007
By
TOBI TOBIAS
tobi@voiceofdance.com
VoiceofDance.com 2007
Marie and the tree from New York City Ballet's The Nutcracker by George Balanchine. Photo by Paul Kolnik.
To the heart-piercing Tchaikovsky score, with a libretto inspired by E.T.A. Hoffmann's creepy tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, it takes off from bourgeois reality in a German Victorian-era town and soars by stages into an eternal fantasy world, transporting the viewer'child or adult'who is susceptible to such wonders. Opening with a multigenerational Christmas Eve party at the home of Dr. and Frau Stahlbaum and their offspring, the prepubescent Marie and her kid brother, Fritz, the ballet concludes with an unlikely but delectable visit to the Land of Sweets.
The physical contrasts, a significant part of the show's drama, are immediately apparent. The touchstone example is the Christmas tree that grows to a near-surreal height in Marie's post-party dream, with the proportions of the Stahlbaum parlor growing around it, the way a pregnant woman's body stretches to harbor a developing fetus. The invading mice, child and adult, and their king who has no fewer than seven heads are scaled to human size. (No one who has ever phoned the exterminator will question this.) The doll-size bed in which Marie tenderly rests the toy Nutcracker given to her by her enigmatic Godfather Drosselmeier after it's been wounded by her naughty brother is replaced in the blink of an eye by a full-scale bed. Gliding with no visible source of power, it will eventually carry Marie, when she faints after the battle with the mice, through the falling snow to the Land of Sweets.
The tinyness and seeming fragility of the children's bodies is tellingly juxtaposed with the fully developed height and physique of the adult dancers playing the party hosts and guests. In the spun-sugar universe of the second act, an enormous Mother Ginger (an adult man on stilts masked by a grotesquely voluminous skirt) harbors in that cave below her waist eight diminutive children dressed as polichinelles'clowns derived from the commedia dell'arte. The youngsters emerge through an opening in the skirt that draws aside like a theater curtain and fill the huge stage with the vivacious yet impeccably schooled dancing that is the hallmark of the School of American Ballet, the City Ballet's academy.
Adrian Danchig-Waring as Mother Ginger in New York City Ballet's The Nutcracker by George Balanchine. Photo by Paul Kolnik.
I think it's safe to say that nothing in Balanchine's Nutcracker is small or large in isolation, but rather as it relates to a contrasting counterpart. It's relevant to recall how Lewis Carroll, creating Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, also suspected that children, because of their own rapid and transforming growth, must be keenly if subconsciously aware of shifts in size and more than occasionally unnerved by them.
In conjunction with its measuring the tiny against the huge, The Nutcracker explores the issue of the animate versus the inanimate. The ballet takes its cue from the blurred lines between the two states of being in young children's thinking. (The pre-schooler hysterical because its favorite teddy bear is missing is bewailing the loss of a sentient creature.) Some objects in the ballet, like the life-sized soldier and Harlequin-Columbine pair of dolls that emerge from the giant gift boxes Drosselmeier brings to the Christmas party, are mechanized and recognized and appreciated by the children as evidence of Drosselmeier's ingenious craftsmanship. Other objects, however, expand their range magically. The Nutcracker is the most extreme example of this curious process. First it grows from ordinary doll size to child size, at which point it comes to life, then, after proving its'well, his'valor in battling the mice that threaten Marie, is transformed into another entity entirely: a young prince.
In the ballet's second act, all the divertissements the Sugar Plum Fairy summons to entertain Marie and the prince of her dreams represent sweets and tempting beverages'candy canes, marzipan, hot chocolate'come to life, albeit in metaphoric guise. (Coffee is a sultry harem girl from Arabia; Marzipan is a quintet of shepherdesses reminiscent of Dresden porcelain figurines.)
Some of the shifts in states-of-being The Nutcracker proposes hardly register as strange. The sleigh that transports Marie and her prince back home as the curtain falls doesn't glide over snow, but flies through the night sky. By that time, though, you're ready to believe anything Balanchine shows you.
The social contrasts in Balanchine's Nutcracker are more subtle. The Christmas Eve party that constitutes half of the first act, with the guests ranging from very old to very young, is a lesson in civilized social conduct. It does not ignore the natural exuberance and mischievousness of children. Nor does it question the parental loving care and the joy in material comforts and delights that it presents as the birthright of these offspring of the upper middle class. But it does insist, again and again, on the importance of teaching these youngsters'largely by example, occasionally through discipline'decorous behavior toward one's family and friends. One of the most touching passages in the ballet is the sedate and courtly couplesdance that the adults, including aged grandparents, perform on one side of the stage while the children duplicate it on the other.
Child-life, vividly depicted in the Party Scene, where the little girls and the little boys intermittently form single-sex clans of their own, is, for the most part, set against the adult-life for which the children are being "educated." The girls, rocking and cosseting the dolls they receive as the generic "girl gift," are practicing being the mothers their society expects them to become when they grow up. The boys, armed with toy drums and raucous horns, are allowed to be rowdy'but only to a point, and then their dads step in to restore the peace. The viewer is constantly reassured that civility will prevail against unruliness. In our disheveled times, these are indeed tidings of comfort and joy.
For some members of the audience, an element of the real life of the child and adult performers alike is part of the picture. Veteran fans of the New York City Ballet realize that few of the children they're seeing on the stage will grow up to become members of the company'a very few, but still... And even the majority of these youngsters, who won't, symbolize the cruel and romantic fact that the making of a professional classical dancer depends on beginning to impose an exacting system of training on a poignantly underage body. (Balanchine states this yet more overtly in his Mozartiana, when a decade of growth is illustrated in an instant, as four of the company's tallest, leggiest women suddenly replace the quartet of spindly legged SAB girls who accompany the ballerina in the ballet's opening section, all eight dressed alike.)
The headiest example of the Nutcracker boysfuture may lie in the choreographer of this Nutcracker himself. Back in Russia, early in the last century, at St. Petersburg's Maryinsky Theater, where the Nutcracker ballet originated in 1892, choreographed by Lev Ivanov, Georgi Balanchivadze was one of the generations of boys who played the Nutcracker Prince. As we know, he grew up to be one of the most significant dance-makers in history. His version of The Nutcracker, created for the New York City Ballet in 1954, retains intact the original's mime monologue that the little prince delivers to the Sugar Plum Fairy, recounting the dramatic backstory of his and Marie's arrival in the Land of Sweets.
The bourgeois existence of the Stahlbaums and their circle'very nice indeed, very comfortable materially and emotionally'is, of necessity, dull, because it is predictable, reined in by the dictates of decorum. As in the Hoffmann tale, a Godfather Drosselmeier, with his strange dual power of mechanical craft and sheer magic'is required to form the bridge between the ordinary and the extraordinary. It can be argued that everything that occurs after Marie falls asleep, post-party, can be considered merely a dream, engendered by over-excitement. Still, there is a psychological truth to the adventures that unfurl, and it creates an ecstatic alternative reality that can be achieved only through the imagination of a child like Marie. She is the child we all once were before life taught us to obey the local rules, the child we occasionally remember with joy and regret, and the child we might become again, if only for two hours in the New York State Theater.
For more information:
*Disclaimer: The views of Tobi Tobias are not necessarily the views of Voice of Dance*
Comments
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
.jpg)
