St Lucy’s Nutcracker, winter solstice prep

Dead pointes from St Lucy’s Nutcracker performances

The photo: Some of the dead pointe shoes from performances of St. Lucy’s version of The Nutcracker. A pair of Bea’s Freeds are somewhere in the photo. Bea was Dew Drop this year a role I thought she excelled at, but I had coached her thoroughly. The only two adult males were dancers from my troupe who danced the Snow King and Sugarplum fairy’s Cavalier. It appeared to be a straight G-rated version as parents and the public were in attendance and was very well received.

Pelvic training equipment: However, all the girls in the corps who had reached menarche were wearing their Semina (coil spring) diaphragms whether they were menstrual or not. Returning readers will remember that Semina is the one with the lovely transparent pink silicone dome. It was a festive touch for the season! The Principals and soloists, all with deep post-pubic vaults, wore Labia Labs version of the Oves cervical cap and sets of one inch solid Pyrex Ben Wa balls. I had wanted to have them try performing with balls inserted and this was the first opportunity to have them actually do it.

Vaginal training: In addition to the normal ballet rehearsals for the Principals, Soloists and Corps I held closed pelvic rehearsals for the Principals and Soloists where the girls and I wore crotchless tights, our one inch Pyrex balls and no panties so if we expelled a ball while landing a jump, pirouette or during a développé everyone would know it. I went crotchless with my students so they would feel more at ease displaying their pubes in a professional setting and by dancing the pas de deux with the guys and landing the jumps, performing the pirouettes, fouettés and développés w/o dropping a ball to show them I could do what I was asking them to do.

The girls all had sex with my two male dancers during their Contemporary Sexual Health class labs so it wasn’t as though their partners hadn’t seen their vulvae before, so their anxiety was quickly over as everyone acted in a very professional manner, the guys didn’t sprout woodies in their dance belts and no one stared at their bare pubes - since it was well understood that the girls needed to become confident that they could perform with their one inch balls inserted w/o an accident. I was certain they could as it takes a lot of force to expel a one inch (.65 oz.) glass ball out of the deep post-vaginal vault of a well toned vagina.  

To build stamina we went over the several pas de deux and solos repeatedly. After the girls, all of whom had fully waxed pubes, got over the fact that they were working w/o a net during rehearsals they really tightened up and after the first run through during the first rehearsal they became much more confident and none dropped any balls. I was so proud of them!  For the performances they did wear tight fitting mesh thongs, invisible under tights and tutus, to catch an expelled ball to prevent it dropping down the leg inside her tights and ruining the line of the leg, but that proved to have been unnecessary. I was so pleased that none of my Ben Wa girls expelled a ball or balls during their performances!

First Response hCG testing: Willow took her first hCG test today and it showed negative. Of course it did, she is menstrual and bleeding heavily, but the regimen called for her testing today. Returning readers will remember she is Mitch’s primary training partner while we see if he can impregnate women using copper IUDs.  I think she is perfectly safe. She is using the FIRST RESPONSE Early Result Pregnancy Test that shows hCG as early as six days prior to the start of the woman’s period. Pirate is paying for her tests which are about $13 on-line, but since we buy in bulk for our escorts a two-pack is about $10 USD.

I’m taking pelvic training with Mitch frequently myself and, as returning readers may recall, I use an Oves cervical cap screwed down tight on my cervix, (when I’m not menstrual) so statistically I should be at a higher risk than women on hormones who are using their method correctly. I’m testing with Willow just to give her support and I don’t expect either of us to test positive, but we need to see if we can support Mitch and show he isn’t dangerous to women using Copper IUDs or cervical barriers when used correctly.

Cycles for the winter solstice: As this is being written (Sunday 12-15-2013) I’m CD1 and flowing lightly. I have a Milex Omniflex (silicone coil spring wide seal diaphragm) inserted for flow control. I should be in full flow tomorrow and have my heavy days on Tues. – Wed.  My Wards (Odette, Odile, and Bea) are now in synchrony with me. Willow got her GyneFix about three and a half weeks ago and she is menstrual now. This is her first period with a GyneFix implanted so it has been a heavy one, but not something she couldn’t handle with Ibuprofen and an iron rich diet.

So we will be CD7 +/- 2 on December 21^st, the winter solstice, which means Willow certainly and some of the rest of us may be fertile during our celebrations as Druid Priestesses ritually offering our bodies and initiating new young male candidates in to the small community of believers in the old ways. All in my circle have copper GyneFix IUDs implanted and the men will have all been screened for STIs so we should all be as safe as possible as far as our contraception and sexual health is concerned. However, pneumonia from the weather is a distinct possibility.

Chris, our male Gyn who travels with us, has gone on ahead taking equipment we might need and to work with the local medical practitioner to scout and screen suitable candidates for initiation into the mysteries of the old ways. There was some talk during our Thanksgiving dinner about the possibility of a blood sacrifice to the goddess in addition to the ritual ones with genital fluids that I and my junior Priestesses will perform, but I’m not sure where that aspect of the ceremony stands.  The winter solstice celebrates death and the renewal of life so it seems appropriate that there should be death – in addition to the ‘little death’ (orgasm) that typically is the climax of the ceremony - associated with celebration of the winter solstice.

Inverness airport (IATA code: INV) Dalcross Scotland: Dalcross is much closer to Ullapool so we will be flying into Dalcross airport which is some six miles east down the coast from Inverness. The main runway at 6,190 feet is long enough to take a G650 at MTOW, maximum takeoff weight.

It’s about 56 miles up the A835 between Inverness and Ullapool then another few miles into the mountains to His Graces hunting lodge so it should take about one and a half to two hours depending on the weather. Jack will have a small fleet of Range Rovers meet us at the private air terminal.

Planned departure: We plan to leave at 1:00 AM on Tuesday the seventeenth which should give us three days to adjust to the eight hour time difference before the celebration on the twenty-first. The pilots want to top off our tanks at Dulles even though we have the range to fly non-stop. That way they say if there is a reroute or some in-flight delay we will have plenty of fuel. That also gives me an opportunity to drop off a very high priority item for the government that will be given to me at McCarran just before departure. 

Weather forecast for Tues. 12/17 arrival:

• The Met forecast for Inverness for Tuesday 12/17 is intervals of sunshine temperatures in the high 30s and a southwesterly wind at 12 mph. 
• The Met forecast for Ullapool for Tuesday 12/17 is for light rain temperature in the low 40s F and an 18 mph southerly wind.

The Met forecast for Ullapool for the winter solstice:

Light clouds with temperature 41 – 48.2 F at sea level with a 24 mph south westerly wind. Sunrise 09:04 Sunset 15:33. So at best (assuming 10° colder on site) it will be about at freezing with a strong wind off the ocean. With sunrise at 9:04 at least we won’t have to get up before 5:00 AM unless the weather turns really bad, or Himself decides otherwise.

ABT’s new Nutcracker: a review

Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg as Clara and her Nutcracker

The New York Times
December 24, 2010
A ‘Nutcracker’ Sprouts Alter Egos
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

Once you’ve seen a number of different “Nutcrackers,” you might think you know all the main ways that the old ballet can be retold. But you don’t.

In Alexei Ratmansky’s new version of “The Nutcracker,” currently in its world premiere season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, American Ballet Theater has a production like no other. Made with complete theatrical authority from first to last, it shows many aspects of Mr. Ratmansky: satirist, storyteller, dramatist, poet. I’m impatient to see it again, but a large part of the delight it affords on first viewing lies in not knowing what’s going to happen.

This work (to which critics were first admitted on Thursday) isn’t a “Nutcracker” that leads us back to the original story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, though it takes a few unusual points from there. Instead its basic structure is that of numerous Russian “Nutcrackers” since the Stalinist era: little Clara (the Russians usually call her Masha) no sooner sees the Nutcracker, once he’s transformed into a Prince, than they fall in love-love-love and at once turn into adults. Never mind going to meet any Sugar Plum Fairy — instead they get to dance the music of her pas de deux themselves.

But Mr. Ratmansky takes that formula, tweaks it and makes it new. When his boy (transformed) and girl meet, they’re kindred spirits but from different worlds. They suddenly become doubled — they acquire mature alter egos, a twist that transforms the ballet’s sense of time and space. They’re like the hero and heroine of Philip Pullman’s superlative trilogy, “His Dark Materials” — young lovers from parallel universes.

At first it seems marvelous that we see the grown-ups they’ll become, but then Mr. Ratmansky takes us one step further and shows us how those adults still feel like the children they were. Their grand pas de deux is alternately formal and informal: they show the big, classically perfect dance shapes, arcs, gestures and steps that reveal their ideal qualities, but they also just can’t help expressing their own lesser-mortal amazement about this.

The main story is still focused on their younger selves. Mr. Ratmansky has animated the entire company. (I don’t enjoy a few supporting performances, but at every moment they’re precisely considered.) Yet amid several superb interpretations on Thursday, none surpassed those of the two central children. Young Catherine Hurlin’s partly angry, partly vulnerable, never picture-perfect Clara exemplifies the individuality of Mr. Ratmansky’s approach. Tyler Maloney as her Nutcracker Boy has the same courage and the same vulnerability. Mr. Ratmansky asks him to sustain one particular pose — arms open, face upturned, not facing the audience but on a diagonal — that suggests his mix of astonishment and gratitude, and it strikes home as something unusual in ballet, a private moment that is emotionally huge but not being sold to the public.

When these two children find themselves in the Land of Snow, it’s not a winter wonderland for them — it’s an adventure, now frightening, now freezing. The poetry of Mr. Ratmansky’s vision here is very striking: no Snowflakes were ever more ambiguous, and they have been given pouncing jumps, spinning arcs, and insistent gestures that make us feel we’re in the land of Hans Christian Andersen’s “Snow Queen.”

Later this young heroine and hero do meet a Sugar Plum Fairy — in this case, an exotically regal, nondancing one. It’s thanks to her presentation that suddenly they have another moment out of time and see their adult selves united in love and, finally, marriage.

As the older Clara and Nutcracker, Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg gave performances on Thursday that count immediately among the high-water marks of their already distinguished careers. Mr. Ratmansky has given them roles that wonderfully yoke their dual commitment to ballet classicism and to dramatic sincerity. There are spectacular throws and catches in the pas de deux, and yet acrobatics aren’t the point here; what you think about is the spontaneity of love’s first excitement.

Mr. Hallberg’s solo starts with a slow fall sideways that’s exactly what nobody expects to see in a ballet, but this quirky impetus becomes the humanizing force within the beautifully bobbing series of jumps that follow. Just as Ms. Murphy’s Clara finishes the main part of her solo (one of the blander passages of the work, admittedly), she goes right off into the wings, then sticks her head out as if sharing a joke with us. She pops straight back on and tears up the stage in a circuit of jumps and turns in which her own terrific academic clarity and fullness become charged with renewed rapture.

Mr. Hallberg starts the coda with a solo of extraordinarily shimmering delicacy, building up to a more conventional display of heroic jumps around the stage (danced with unconventional finesse). Yet not long after, within the very same number, both he and Ms. Murphy, amid a busy phrase, suddenly stand on flat feet and reel a little — as if unable to believe what’s happening to them. These dances keep saying both, “This is perfect,” and, “We can’t believe this is happening”; you feel how full their hearts are.

The production seizes your attention surely from its opening kitchen scene. True, I don’t care for the two synchronized dancing maids. (Here and in some other character dances, Léonide Massine’s choreography comes to mind, not for the first time when watching Mr. Ratmansky’s.) But the whole “Upstairs, Downstairs” layering of this household, funny and touching, is vividly, intimately introduced to us here — and there’s a memorable preview of the mice. Richard Hudson’s sets and costumes perfectly complement the choreography, giving us a partly caricatured Dickensian world that changes unexpectedly into the silver birches of a Russian winterscape.

The cartoon quality in those maids becomes more irksome when whole groups of children repeat the same gestures in unison. Then, as Mr. Ratmansky’s version proceeds, these notes of caricature become part of a pattern. The effect of this is to make Clara and the Nutcracker — like Alice in Wonderland — by far the most real and three-dimensional figures onstage. The parents and Drosselmeyer are all vivid, but these grown-ups are almost as not-quite-real as the mice and the Snowflakes and the Sweets.

That’s fine, moment by moment and dance by dance. There are various kinds of laughs to be had from the Arabian and Russian dances, as well as from Mother Ginger (whose skirts contain a real surprise). But we never sense that Clara and the Nutcracker have become visitors to a realm of purer, larger forms. Though Mr. Hudson’s Sweet Kingdom designs are bright, they have none of the poetic dimensions of his Snow Scene. Even the main point of the Waltz of the Flowers is primarily just fun — with busy, silly male bees pollinating happy, silly, jubilant female flowers — though arranged with absorbing complexity.

The entertainment level doesn’t flag. Missing, at any rate on a first view, is the all-embracing generosity of spirit that marks many good “Nutcrackers.” Instead — and it’s a beautiful paradox — the large moments of Mr. Ratmansky’s version are intimate ones.

This version will repay re-watching. Ormsby Wilkins and the American Ballet Theater Orchestra were at their very finest on Thursday, apparently loving — without rushing — the score’s rhythmic interplay and fantastic instrumentation.

Several alternate casts of dancers follow, probably bringing other nuances. I plan to see at least one more of them this year and hope that it won’t be long before I have the chance to see this exceptional first cast again.

Personal comment: I think he liked it! Merry Christmas everyone!