Alastair Macaulay on The Nutcracker

Scene from New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker

The Nutcracker: In celebration of the Christmas season I’m posting this piece by Alastair Macaulay, dance critic for the NYT.

The New York Times
December 17, 2009
Dance
Depths to Plumb, Sugarplum
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

As 2009 ends, it’s worth remembering that it has been the centenary of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes’s turning ballet into the genre that was a prime vehicle for modernism. Meanwhile it’s hard to forget that we are deep into the annual “Nutcracker” season, in which tutus, snowflakes, sweets, the Sugarplum Fairy, magic and a child’s vision of transformation all come together. Few American cities are “Nutcracker”-free zones at this time of year; among those in New York, City Ballet’s production by George Balanchine runs now for two and a half more weeks, and that’s just the best known. Are modernism and “The Nutcracker” irreconcilable?

No. Though Diaghilev specialized in showing three or four modern works per evening, he was not above the full-length traditional ballet. He hit upon the idea of his “Sleeping Princess” production in 1921 because he was looking for a long-running blockbuster (along the lines of the hit musical of the day, “Chu Chin Chow”) to finance his more esoteric efforts. When his colleague Serge Grigoriev told him that such a production would soon bore him, Diaghilev — hoping that it would be the cash cow he needed — said: “Not at all. You’d run it, and I’d do something else.” Poor Diaghilev never found his cash cow. But his protégé Balanchine did. His 1954 “Nutcracker,” with the Christmas tree that grows like Jack’s beanstalk, has proved the most successful production of Tchaikovsky’s 1892 ballet in world history. (The original “Nutcracker,” which also had a tree that grew, opened in St. Petersburg when Diaghilev was a young man there.) Balanchine’s version also gave New York City Ballet the stability with which he was able to create his most avant-garde productions, notably “Agon” (Stravinsky, 1957) and “Episodes” (Webern, 1959).

You can love those two pieces, which remain far ahead of their time in body language and structure, and still find Balanchine’s “Nutcracker” enthralling. Every season I revisit his “Nutcracker” several times, officially to see New York City Ballet’s cast changes in the lead roles in Act II. But at every viewing the chief reward is to discover yet more detail in Act I. Over the decades thousands of dancegoers have learned to think the same; many might agree that Balanchine’s “Nutcracker” is actually more expressively diverse, more theatrically rich, than the extreme modernism of “Agon” or “Episodes” or his Stravinsky masterpieces of the 1960s and ’70s.

In a recent article in The Washington Post, Sarah Kaufman writes of the “pervading tweeness” of “The Nutcracker,” wishes that “ballet had something better to do at this time of year than endlessly reminisce like a sweet, whiskery auntie,” and argues that the work’s “stranglehold is all but squeezing ballet dry.” By contrast, she harks back to the Diaghilev days, “when ballet — ballet — lassoed the avant-garde art movement.”

The full-length ballets, Ms. Kaufman writes, are “European derived.” (Yes, but then, ballet itself is European derived, as are a great many other arts.) So “what’s American about ballet in America?” she asks. “Why not make an artistic statement with a mix of races, and use the spectrum of humanity deliberately, in a provocative way? Why not harness differences to evoke the America of today, or what we might become if only we had the imagination of an artist?”

Consider “The Hard Nut,” the version of “The Nutcracker” that Mark Morris first staged in Brussels in 1991, and that has been revived many times in America and elsewhere. The party scene is a caricature of a period and a none-too-happy white American family (with a black maid); then the stage world is magically metamorphosed into a colorful mixed-race fantasy in which ballet and barefoot dancers are equally mixed to show a view of society that is both modern-American and transcendent. You can watch it on DVD — it won the “Battle of the ‘Nutcrackers’ ” competition on Ovation TV — and in recent years it has become an annual fixture at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, Calif.

“The Hard Nut” is not a perfect work. Not all of its storytelling is clear, a few of its dances are thin, and it forces some of its narrative against the emphasis of Tchaikovsky’s score. But no American “Nutcracker” has been so internationally successful, and within America perhaps only Balanchine’s is better known. In its finest dances — the Waltz of the Snowflakes above all — that black and white dancers are side by side is merely a premise for an even larger view of humanity, with Mr. Morris’s musicality at its most theatrically exhilarating.

There’s plenty wrong with ballet today, not least with American ballet. It’s sadly true that there are ballet companies whose only annual performances are of “The Nutcracker,” and that almost every American ballet company relies on its “Nutcracker” performances as its most reliable draw. (European companies dance “The Nutcracker” too, but few of them so extensively. The Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, for example, often has “Nutcracker”-free years, and my time in London made me more used to watching Frederick Ashton’s staging of Prokofiev’s three-act “Cinderella” as Christmas fare than any “Nutcracker.”)

But let’s not castigate “The Nutcracker” just because it is the cash cow of American ballet. And let’s not make the mistake of assuming the tweeness of bad “Nutcracker” productions means that the ballet is itself twee.

Just listen to the ballet’s overture. In good productions the view of childhood that starts here, in the miniature orchestration and quick pulse of Tchaikovsky’s introduction, is enchantingly serious. Gradually the music will build in scale until you reach the colossal, slow, full-orchestral grandeur of the Sugarplum adagio in Act II: no ballet score has a greater span, and this shows how passionately Tchaikovsky was depicting the inner life of a child.

There are, by contrast, a number of full-length ballets that take up adult subject matter only to treat it frivolously. (“Le Corsaire” and “Don Quixote,” both musically cheap, are among the most traditional examples. Stanton Welch’s 2009 ballet about Marie Antoinette, “Marie,” is the most recent one I’ve seen.) Much about ballet is bad and is worth trashing; much about it is artistically tawdry and hidebound in bad tradition; and most of its current choreographers are at best poor.

“The Nutcracker,” however, is a musical masterpiece and, in some stagings, a theatrical masterpiece too. Ballet is larger, not smaller, because of it