The Nutcracker | This Dancing Life

Graphic credit: Jeremy Leslie-Spinks

There’s a cold, sharp edge to the wind, frost tingles on the branches, the days are getting shorter and darker, and the sky is heavy with snow clouds. It’s winter, the festive season is upon us, and suddenly, wonderfully, there are performances of “The Nutcracker” almost everywhere.

When December comes, can The Nutcracker be far behind? No, it can’t – not in America, anyway.
Robert Gottlieb

“Nutcracker” is firmly anchored in the tradition of winter celebrations, like mince pies, the sweet Sufganyot doughnuts of Chanukah, Mithai sweets at Diwali, Sweden’s saffron-flavoured Lussekatter buns or roast turkey with stuffing. It’s an eagerly anticipated delight, a mainstay of the classical repertoire, and many audiences are certain that it’s been with us every year since forever.

The truth is that the “Nutcracker” we know is more recent than we think. At the 1892 première in St. Petersburg (which some authorities believe to have been mainly choreographed by Petipa’s assistant, Lev Ivanov), it flopped. Critics found it confusing and disorganised, and no-one liked the contrast between the heavily-rewritten storyline in the first half and the abstract quality of the second. Clara and the Nutcracker Prince were performed by children, which necessarily limited the technical options, and it was presented as the second half of a double bill, following Tchaikovsky’s opera, “Iolanta”. It must have been a long evening.

I like the plot of The Nutcracker – not at all.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

That production was quietly withdrawn after a few performances and disappeared from repertoire. No-one missed it; even Tchaikovsky didn’t really like it, although his twenty-minute suite of excerpts from the ballet score enjoyed considerable success in concert. For almost two decades, no-one danced it at all. Finally, in 1919, a version was produced for the Bolshoi by Alexander Gorsky, based on the Stepanov notation of the earlier choreography, but with a freer and more naturalistic approach to the formalised mise-en-scène of the group scenes. Gorsky cast Clara and the Nutcracker Prince on adult dancers. He gave them the Act II pas de deux, formerly danced by the Sugarplum Fairy and her Cavalier, so that Clara now danced Sugarplum as well, which made dramatic sense. For years, Moscow was the only place in the world where you could see “The Nutcracker”. Eventually a shorter staging was produced in Budapest, and the complete ballet was first danced in London in 1934, staged by Nicholas Sergeyev and based on the original Petipa/Ivanov choreography. That same year Vasily Vainonen mounted “The Nutcracker” for the Kirov company (formerly the Maryinsky Ballet) in Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg), where the première had taken place nearly half a century earlier. Vainonen made the whole adventure a dream of Clara’s (known as “Masha” in his version), from which she awakes at the end of Act II.

The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo subsequently performed a shortened staging in their 1940 New York season. The first full-length version of “The Nutcracker” danced in the United States was William Christensen’s San Francisco production on Christmas Eve, 1944, and the ballet became a firm favourite, returning every Christmas Eve since then in various reinterpretations. George Balanchine’s 1954 version for New York City Ballet was an instant success, and throughout the next decade, “The Nutcracker” became an annual tradition for companies all over the country. This perennial seasonal favourite in its present form really only arrived on the festive scene in the early 1960s. There are now literally hundreds of versions performed every year throughout the world, often featuring children in some of the Prologue dances and occasionally in the divertissements in Act II. Several American companies finance a large part of their season each year through the box-office receipts from their “Nutcracker” – it’s one of the few ballets which are almost guaranteed to sell out every performance, every year.

“The Nutcracker absolutely was our staple every year. We even took it out to California in the summertime, and danced it at the Greek Theatre with great success! Why not? Christmas in summer.”
Conversation Piece: Prima Ballerina Maria Tallchief | september 1994

The original tale was by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, a German writer of Gothic fantasy and horror stories (Petipa would have read this in a translation by Alexandre Dumas père). It strikes some rather violent notes, including wounding, blackmail and various desperate fates which befall the characters — most choreographers try to avoid the more gruesome bits when making up a festive ballet for families with children (on the other hand, it is very easy to wind up at the opposite extreme and produce something so sweet that it becomes sickening). In our time, choreographers have attempted to give the ballet a kind of internal logic of its own — after all, in dreams anything can happen. The story varies throughout all the different versions as much as the choreography; there are even very successful productions which dispense with the plot-line entirely.

If your only dance experience is the Nutcracker, it will be a shock; hopefully shocking in a good way.
Mikhail Baryshnikov

Numerous film versions have been made, starting with Walt Disney’s Fantasia in 1940, in which animated figures danced to excerpts from Act II (with no specific reference to the ballet itself). There are full-length feature films of Kent Stowell’s version for Pacific Northwest Ballet and Balanchine’s production for New York City Ballet; there is also the digitally animated “Barbie in The Nutcracker” and many others. The ballet is frequently shown on television, indeed the choreographer Peter Wright made two different versions (one for the Royal Ballet and one for Birmingham Royal Ballet), both of which were televised. Among the many other film and television recordings are productions by Rudolf Nureyev for the Royal Ballet and for the Paris Opera, Yuri Grigorovich for the Bolshoi, Mark Morris, Matthew Bourne, Kirill Simonov for the Maryinsky, Patrice Bart, Maurice Béjart, Helgi Tomasson, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and others. There are also at least four versions of the ballet on ice…

Clearly, having succeeded all over the world despite its unpromising beginnings, “The Nutcracker” is here to stay. It gets under my skin, this ballet, probably because I associate it with happy times. I’ve staged it, rehearsed many different versions and seen many more, and still I love it. I hope “The Nutcracker” stays with us and remains a cherished seasonal tradition for many years to come.

Happy Nutcracker, everyone!