At first, I was relieved. Over the last four decades, I’ve danced nearly every role in the beloved Christmas ballet, from Fritz (the little boy in the first act party scene who breaks the heroine Clara’s nutcracker) to the soloist roles such as Spanish Chocolate and Chinese Tea who perform for Clara (sometimes named Marie) in the Land of Sweets during the second act. I’ve also been a party guest, a soldier, a mouse, a snowflake, an angel, a flower. The roles I haven’t danced (in productions staged everywhere from the Grand Opera House in Uvalde, Texas, to the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco), my husband has—Arabian, Russian, the Mouse King, the Nutcracker prince. Even our three children have danced in the Nutcracker. I’d be lying if I said I never get tired of it. Every year I get tired of it.

But that’s not why I was happy for a reprieve from visions of sugar plums. The truth is, for the last six years, I’ve been a rehearsal assistant for a ballet school in Oakland, and during the Nutcracker season, I stage the Chinese Tea variation, which means that every Saturday afternoon from September to December, I teach 7-year-olds to dip and bow and shuffle on the correct counts to prepare them for their 58 seconds on stage. On performance day, they don black tunics with frog buttons and Mandarin collars, their faces shadowed under coolie hats.

For years I’ve been cognizant that the steps I teach are at best an embarrassing show of artistic ignorance, and at worst a shameful display of racist cultural appropriation. But I’ve kept doing my job. After all, I tell myself, it’s not my choreography. I’m just teaching the same steps students have danced for decades. Besides, everyone else seems to be fine with it. When those 7-year-olds shuffle onstage, the whole audience coos, “Awwww!”

But each year, I wince a little more. It’s not just 58 seconds, I realize. It’s months of Saturday afternoons, year after year, reinforcing a cultural stereotype on young minds, and I’m the one demonstrating it.

Honestly? I’ve been too chicken to confront the director of the school and label these time-honored steps as cultural misrepresentation. This year, worries over COVID-19 contagion did my work for me.

To be clear, by traditional Nutcracker standards, what I teach is nowhere near as offensive as the yellowface, Fu Manchu mustaches, and geisha wigs that appear in so many Nutcracker Chinese variations across the United States—so racist and so prevalent that an organization called “Final Bow for Yellowface” was founded in 2017 to confront these harmful Asian stereotypes in theater productions.

And that’s just scratching the surface. In the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s 1986 Nutcracker movie (with sets and costumes by Maurice Sendak of Where the Wild Things Are fame), whirling dervishes wearing nappy dreadlock wigs dance in brownface alongside a turbaned Pasha and servants in fez-inspired caps, all set against the backdrop of an 18th-century Ottoman seraglio.

When I was a student on the brink of a professional ballet career at Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle, I danced over 150 performances of this version of the Nutcracker. Standing in the wings getting ready for “Waltz of the Flowers,” I didn’t think anything of the black dreadlocks or dark-brown makeup I saw on stage. At the time, it didn’t seem any different from growing up in El Paso, where my fellow Mexican American friends and I whitened our skin with baby powder to “fit in” as snowflakes for the snow scene of our local Nutcracker production.

Now, of course, I am appalled that there was a time when I normalized whitening or darkening one’s skin, and that I felt I wasn’t enough of an artist on the inside unless I looked the part—or how I was taught it should look—on the outside.

That’s almost as bad as the middle-aged me who is too chicken to go to her employer and say, “This Chinese Tea variation is culturally inappropriate.”

What’s complicated is that the relief I feel from side-stepping the Nutcracker battle this year is mingled with my own sentimental feelings toward the ballet. As if on cue, an internal timer chimed right around Thanksgiving, and I was surprised to find I still felt a need for it, like an ache for comfort food.

I miss teaching the ballet, and moments like when all 12 second-graders realize that they need to plié on the count of five to jump on the count of six—and they actually do it.

So, Nutcracker, I admit it: I can’t quit you. But this year without you has given me the space to realize I have to demand better for you going forward. As a teacher, I will no longer be an accomplice to your Spanish dancers with pseudo-flamenco steps, your Arabian princesses in sequined I Dream of Jeannie midriffs and harem pants. I can’t condone rice paddy hats, even if they’re worn by adorable 7-year-olds.

As every ballet dancer knows, the short story “Nutcracker and Mouse King” was written by E.T.A. Hoffmann in 1816, then retold by Alexandre Dumas (the Three Musketeers guy)—and adapted by Tchaikovsky and his collaborators for the original St. Petersburg ballet. Tchaikovsky’s ballet spends the second act in the Land of the Sweets, where Clara watches an afternoon of dances supposedly from around the world, with official titles such as “Chocolate from Spain,” “Coffee from Arabia,” “Tea from China,” and “Trepak.” But in both Hoffmann’s fairytale and the Dumas version, there is no Land of the Sweets. No Spaniards. No consumer goods from Arabia or China. That international aspect was a convention of 19th-century balletomanes. It’s not germane to the original text.

But what I didn’t know until I turned to my local library’s quarantine-friendly curbside pickup to soothe my sudden Nutcracker ache this season, was that E.T.A. Hoffmann supplemented his writer’s income as a civil servant in Prussia, where he earned a reputation as a judge who couldn’t be bribed, even though this stance of moral integrity worked against him.

“Nutcracker and Mouse King” was a present to the real Marie and Fritz, children of an upper-class ministry official. In it, Hoffmann nested life advice in a fairy tale that is in turn nested in a fairy tale. The character Godfather Drosselmeier (arguably a stand-in for Hoffmann), who gifts the nutcracker to Marie in the first place, is the only adult who listens when Marie recounts her dreams. The tree grew to an enormous size, she insists. Her nutcracker and his soldiers fought a mouse king with seven heads, and she helped the nutcracker defeat the king when she threw her shoe at one of the crowns.

Everyone else tells Marie to keep her ideas to herself. Only Drosselmeier encourages her to break with social expectations, to trust in her imagination, and quite literally, believe in her dreams. 

Because she does this, Marie becomes the queen of a magic land “where you can see … the most splendid and wondrous things.” That is, Hoffmann clarifies in his final lines, “if you have the right eyes to see them with.” 

I don’t know if I have the “right eyes” to have all the answers here.

But I do know that I miss the cacophony of instruments in the orchestra pit warming up on opening night, and the magical moment when they become a single note before the overture begins. I know that when the conductor’s baton rises and pauses, it is like the space before a breath or the centering of the soul. I know that Tchaikovsky’s music, with its chimes and plucks and swirls, creates a special kind of magic that taps into a dancer’s heart. I know that we are all artists on the inside, regardless of what we look like on the outside. And if we can draw on that magic for new inspiration, I believe we have it in us going forward to create the most splendid and wondrous things.

The post Dreaming of a Better <i>Nutcracker</i> appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What I remember most of all is that I was completely smitten with this dance thing.

A friend later suggested we try ballet, and I was all in. Within a few months, though, she had dropped out, while I became even more committed. In college, I tried modern dance, then jazz, and, decades later, an oh-so-brief stint at tap dancing. As a teen, I was clear-eyed enough to know I was not ballerina material. But I had other ambitions. I was a voracious consumer of newspaper and magazine arts sections, and by the time I was 15, I had decided I would become a dance critic.

What an absurd aspiration! Maybe a dozen people in the whole country were making a living writing about dance. But my passion was born out of doing, in the same way that millions of children play and compete at soccer, football, baseball, volleyball, tennis.

My own muscle memory of waltzing, spinning, and grand jêtés developed into and fostered a love for observing others performing those same steps, which is not so different from how children who play Little League end up becoming diehard baseball fans.

Learning to appreciate dance in its many forms was a little bit like learning to eat. Because most of us like to move our bodies, even a little, anyone can understand and enjoy a dance performance. You don’t have to know the meaning of specific gestures. Early on, I was most impressed by the obvious things like a performer’s physical prowess and remarkable athletic feats. I would sit up in the balcony at L.A.’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to see American Ballet Theatre, where company stars Cynthia Gregory and Fernando Bujones were first crushes.

The dance world cracked open a little more each time I tried something new; it was like tasting an unusual dish in a different country. At UCLA’s Royce Hall, the Martha Graham Company shook up my entrenched stereotype that modern dance was not as masterful as classical technique. It certainly was. I remember how elegant the dancers looked, how stretched and tall. And I was struck by the stylized movement, the Graham contraction in which the torso is concave, almost scooped out. The heroic emotions of Graham’s storytelling touched me in a way I hadn’t anticipated.

Twyla Tharp’s “The Fugue” was another memorable performance, further busting down my preconceptions and expanding my ability to appreciate. It was stark, simple, and yet miraculous: three performers making dance and music simultaneously, the only sounds consisting of feet hitting the amplified stage.

About the same time, I had my first encounters with the works of modern dance pioneers Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham. I was mesmerized by the physicality of Taylor’s work and baffled by Cunningham, whose dances seemed, to me, to meander without meaning and I could not decipher the strange body shapes he devised. I had to learn about his movement experiments, how he ordered sections by chance “operations,” such as flipping a coin. When I was still looking for harmony and narrative, I learned that Cunningham believed movement and music existed in separate universes, even if they accompanied one another. Watching Cunningham changed the way I see—and criticize—dance forever, because it forced me to see dance not only with my own eyes, but through the lens of the creator’s intentions.

In 1983, I moved to New York and was lucky enough to start my first regular reviewing gig for a Brooklyn weekly newspaper just as the Brooklyn Academy of Music launched its Next Wave Festival. That festival was a groundbreaking series for large-scale dance, music, and theater and it introduced me—all at once—to envelope-pushing dance by an extraordinary generation of original-thinking artists of the United States and Europe: Pina Bausch, Mark Morris, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and others.

At the same time I was watching all of this avant-garde work—Bausch covered the stage with a thick layer of loamy dirt for her version of “Rite of Spring”—I was also trying to figure out neo-classicism, the style of ballet without an overt story, but which was wedded to the score in ways that required I have a more thorough knowledge of music, too. I got a subscription to the New York City Ballet the year after George Balanchine, the co-founder, died.

What looked like a professional life was also a personal life that I was carving out for myself. Without fully realizing it, seeing dance, and also going to museums, galleries, plays, was becoming more and more a defining part of who I am.

Dance is both inside and outside the mainstream of life. In this country we have a finicky and complex relationship to the arts. A 10-year comparison of the National Endowment for the Arts’ public participation surveys found that audiences attending live performing arts events have declined slowly, but 70 percent of Americans in the 2012 NEA survey said they watched art (including dance) electronically. Sure enough, dance keeps cropping up in pop culture, demonstrating that it’s still a powerful force—whether it’s the nearly 23 million views for Hozier’s “Take Me to the Church” video starring Ukrainian ballet superstar Sergei Polunin, or the longevity of hit television shows such as “Dancing With the Stars.”

“Cravos,” by choreographer Pina Bausch. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

My first reviews were mediocre—or worse. I used to think a critic’s job was to educate the reader. But I developed a different understanding of my role in the triangle that is the artist, audience, and critic, thanks to all those years of learning about contemporary dance and art. I wanted my criticism to tell the reader what the dance looked and felt like; what was good or bad about it and why; and to put the company and the performance in its proper context. I aimed to create my own piece of artistic writing that could stand on its own worthiness.

I also came to understand that I was witnessing and writing a slice of history. In 1973, the Joffrey Ballet and Twyla Tharp’s company came together to perform Tharp’s cross-over dance “Deuce Coupe,” with music by The Beach Boys. Soon after, other choreographers started picking apart the virtual wall between modern dance and ballet. Now, 45 years after the premiere of “Deuce Coupe,” a fusion of ballet and modern dance is the ubiquitous and dominant style. Some ballet-lovers have despaired that, even though 19th-century classical ballet is still taught through rigorous daily classes, stylistically appropriate performances of traditional story ballets will disappear. I, too, would mourn the complete loss of classic portrayals of, for example, “Sleeping Beauty” (by Marius Petipa, 1890) or “Giselle” (by Jules Perrot and Jean Coralli, 1841). But I’m being optimistic, and I don’t think that will happen entirely because these traditional ballets still sell well. On the other hand, dance is carried forward through oral tradition, and with each passing year it becomes ever more difficult for dancers to perform these 19th-century pieces with artistic integrity.

As the dances and dancers have changed, so have the critics. Many newspapers have laid off their arts critics, disrupting that artist-audience-critic triangle. Dance companies and artists can directly reach out to their fans through the internet. But the best critics supply context and that all-important impartial authority that can’t be replaced by stories written by the marketing department. I and other critics have artists begging us to keep writing reviews.

But one thing I feel is that dance is kinetic and you don’t have to know everything about it to find pleasure and discover gratification in a performance. Most choreographers care less about the audience deciphering their specific meaning and process, than they do about viewers feeling stimulated by what they see onstage.

Which brings us back to creative movement. That’s what dance is—movement born from a creative impulse. Just bring a little imagination, an inquisitive nature, and your youthful muscle memories, and you’re prepared for any dance performance.

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