Aside from the fact that it requires a number of professionally trained children, which most ballet companies do not possess, The Nutcracker is not suitable for a company built, like the majority, around a few soloists and with a corps de ballet capable of little more than calisthenics. George Balanchine has always set his face against such a structure. The ideal he has worked for is a company in which every member is technically capable of dancing a solo role; in his choreography, instead of the conventional corps de ballet acting in unison, everyone has his unique part to play. Balanchine sees The Nutcracker as a festival of joy, a sort of Christmas pantomime, and only those who have lost their sense of joy and for whom, consequently ballet is a meaningless art, will find it juvenile.
---W.H, Auden, 1954 Program Note.
The Nutcracker is still the only ballet that too many parents take their kids to. And too many people see it for its story and not for its intricate and extraordinary choreography. But I'm becoming resigned to that. The Nutcracker, like the best popular entertainment, can be enjoyed on multiple levels, from the spectacle of the costumes and scenery to the incredible dancing. Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but I think that New York City Ballet has improved immensely since the departure of the autocratic Peter Martins and his replacement by the "interim artistic team" of Jonathan Stafford, Justin Peck, Craig Hall and Rebecca Krohn. On Friday all the dancers --including sixty-three children from the school, rehearsed and supervised by Dena Abergel and Arch Higgins -- were at the top of their form, especially The Sugarplum Fairy and Her Cavalier, danced by soloists Sara Adams and Sebastian Villarini-Velez, dancing passionately to the energetic conducting of the Tschaikovsky music by music director Andrew Litton.
The Nutcracker is such a holiday staple now that not everyone is aware that when Balanchine choreographed it in 1954 it was mostly a forgotten ballet, the 1892 original choreography by Petipa and Ivanov mostly lost. Balanchine had danced in The Nutcracker as a teenager at the Maryinski in Russia and felt that there would be an audience for it in the fifties, with spectacle and costumes and a fairytale story for most people and new dances for Tschaikovsky's beautiful music. What he didn't figure out was how to get the adults who brought their children to this ballet to bring them to his more abstract and austere ballets to the music of Stravinsky, Hindemith, Bach, Bizet, et al. In some ways, of course, perhaps it didn't matter: the sold-out crowds for The Nutcracker (48 performances this year) help finance the more abstract ballets and those who are interested manage to find their way to them, at whatever age. Balanchine's Nutcracker has now found its way to other ballet companies, most of whom do not have the resources to do it at the level of New York City Ballet, but it might help keep ballet alive in the 21st century while we wait patiently for new and inspired choreography
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