It's a pyramid of theatrical marvels, each one outdazzling the last. But I think we aren't as much impressed by the dazzle as we are moved by the emotion it represents; a kind of mounting ecstatic melancholy holds us in its grip.
---Arlene Croce on Balanchine's Nutcracker, "The New Yorker," Jan 22 1979
I don't have --at the moment -- too much to add to what I wrote about The Nutcracker two years ago on this blog. I was put off by the tendency of too many parents to take their kids to The Nutcracker and then never again to another ballet, as well as discussing this ballet with others and hearing them rave about the growing Christmas tree without any appreciation of the dancing or the choreography. But this is certainly not the fault of Balanchine or the ballet; i.e., Balanchine did a lot of work for the theatre and movies --before he took over New York City Ballet --and understood the power of theatrical effects. Balanchine's Nutcracker is like Chaplin's films: it can be appreciated by everyone in different ways and at different levels, from the growing tree to the incredible intricacy of the arabesques, traveling rond de jambs and tour jetes in the Waltz of the Flowers and the beautiful music of Tschaikovsky, here conducted by Andrews Sill.
As usual the children were great, 63 children rehearsed by Dena Abergel, Children's Ballet Master. I have often mentioned that Balanchine's choreography emphasizes the solo, the couple and the group, but he also emphasizes, in The Nutcracker and a few other ballets (A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example) the interactions of different ages. In The Nutcracker, for instance, all the children want to be grown-ups and many of the grown-ups wish they could be children again and there is a tension, part of the melancholy that Arlene Croce mentions, among what we are, what we could be, and what we could have been.
The Nutcracker, like many of Balanchine's ballets, is somewhat dancer-proof. In Tuesday's performance they had the second string in (no principals) and they were superb, perhaps to some extent due to the chance they were given and maybe even somewhat due to the current absence of Peter Martins. Particularly lovely were Unity Phelan as The Sugarplum Fairy and Cameron Dieck as Her Cavalier; the magical moment when she glides across the stage on point while barely touching him captures the beauty of a relationship where each person is independent but still thrives with the support of another, a constant Balanchine theme.
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