Dance - Part 1 - The Nutcracker

It’s that time of year again - pumpkins are replaced with sugarplums, and we get our annual dose of culture with the obligatory Nutcracker. For several years now, I’ve respond by choreographing a version in my head that abandons pandering to children and rescues it from the implicit association that art must be sweetened for the obese masses.

My premise is quite simple. Instead of one company, use a different troop for each dance. Eliminate the boredom of a single choreographer who can only identify different styles of dance with props like fans and chopsticks; replace it with the real thing. Every person on stage must be able to dance. No more cameos for patrons and their brats

It’s easy to see act two. Imagine, a flamenco company doing the Spanish dance, a group of belly dancers doing the Arab, a Ukranian folk troop doing the Russian dance. For the Chinese, I’d recruit one of those dragon dance groups I associate with New Year’s celebrations.

The snow scene is easy to visualize - a genuine full classical corps de ballet, with soloists, pas de deux, pas de trois, and other combinations, all in white tutus, all women. When the choral part begins, the singers enter in the rear. Of course the music is live. The women are in full length tutus and ballet shoes, the men in white pants, white turtlenecks, silver tunics and jazz shoes. The men are the ones who pull the ice sleigh at the end of the scene.

Staging the rest of the ballet requires thinking about the narrative. I would set it in contemporary times, and have four children. The curtain would open on a living room with Clara in jeans combing the hair of her younger sister Cora. Her older sister, Carla, would be on the sofa at stage left rear with her hair in huge curlers, talking on a phone with a long cord using moves reminiscent of those from 1950s Broadway shows. Fritz is dressed and playing with his truck.

The Drosselmeyer catering firm is finishing its set up to the right. The company sent two black dancers. The male rushes over to add finishing touches to a theater arch downstage left; the maid fusses over the small table with a punch bowl downstage right. Please, no complaints about racial stereotypes: this is a snobbish, upperclass home that hires the underclasses.

The mother comes in, shoos off Carla and Clara, sends the caterers to their places behind the table, then takes her position with Cora and Fritz. Guests arrive. The men gravitate to the drink table and demonstrate golf swings, the older boys upstage left feint basketball moves, the young boys downstage take turns showing off to each other, perhaps a clogger, a shoeplotten, a Michael Jackson imitation. Her husband joins the men, the daughters drift in when they’ve changed costumes. The women’s ritual of air kissing is exaggerated when each new woman and female child joins the reception line.

The guests would include one couple with two teen-age children, one a boy for Carla, the other Carla’s confidant. A second couple would have two boys, one for Carla’s confidant, one for Fritz. The third would have two young children, one for Fritz, one for Cora. No one for Clara.

The adults are professional ballroom dancers. After the initial formal circle dance, each would get a solo spin doing a different style. Some might not fit the music as well as waltzes, but I’m sure salsa or tango dancers know how to adapt. The teenagers could demonstrate what ever is the current teenage jazzy dance.

It’s while the teenagers are dancing that Fritz begins fighting with his two friends, and the male caterer rushes over to start the entertainment - the dancing dolls. The first is a native American for Fritz, maybe a Hoop Dancer. The second is a statuesque Martha Graham dancer for Carla, who uses Carla and her friend as assistants, all dressed in the flowing Greek gowns we associate with that style. The last is a Black tap dancer who does a Bojangles routine to Cora and her friend’s Shirley Temples.

Nothing for Clara. The caterer realizes the problem, and pulls the nutcracker from under the drink table. Fritz gets petulant, and breaks it. The guests realize it’s time to leave. While the caterers are removing the table, the mother walks off with Cora and Fritz making faces at each other behind her back. The father gives his arm to Carla and they do a high strutting cake walk off stage.

No one notices the child in the middle, Clara, who settles down on the sofa to repair her nutcracker.

When the stage is empty, the caterers do their mock minuet followed by jitterbug dancing of the kind seen in pictures of Negro dance troops from the 1930s and 1940s. Clara applauds; he gives her a huge hush sign and they exit. Stage lights come down, then blink on and off as the tree in the center rear grows.

When the lights come back on, there are two dolls in fluffy tutus by the tree, one on each arm of the nutcracker. The three dolls from the party scene are posed outside the arch. A troop of soldiers stands or kneels in rows to the right.

The mice begin sneaking in while the dolls do their mechanical toy pas de trois. They are acrobats who have all the best parts as they gambol, form pyramids and leap around the soldiers. When they get too near the doll arch, those dancers protect themselves with karate style moves; the mice roll around, play leapfrog. The toy soldiers start to move, but fall like dominos when the mice tease them. It’s the comedy of insouciance against rigid authority.

The mouse king enters to great bows by his subjects, strides over to the nutcracker, picks him up and starts to toss him about. At this time, the part is danced by a teenage boy. Clara fells the mouse king, the nutcracker rolls over, and the toy soldiers right themselves. They are male dancers recruited from Broadway. They use a high kick line to push off the mice, then get a full chorus line turn.

Clara repairs the nutcracker again, and the two young dancers get a short pas de deux before the exit for the snow scene. Clara must be old enough to wear pointe shoes.

The opening of the second act is always difficult. It’s now set in the tropics with a backdrop of jungle vegetation. Oil or candles burn on tall columns. The curtain opens with a troop of southeast Asian dancers in ornate golden, jeweled costumes. Everything is meant to contrast with the cold north of the first act. Clara and the nutcracker, now adult dancers, enter in a sleigh that’s been transformed into a golden gondola pulled by black panthers.

After the ritual four dances, a troop of Afro-Cuban or African dancers enter. No more Mother Goose. Towards the end, the candles burn out, and the sky begins to lighten for dawn. The dancers leave the pair alone on stage.

Then, the jungle comes alive. The waltz of the flowers is given to a mixed company that can do Balanchine romantic ensemble work. The women are jungle flowers, the men in greens. Then the sugar plum fairy’s danced by a jungle queen, and the pas de deux by the adult Clara and her nutcracker prince. Towards the end, the cats return, and the flowers retreat. The panthers are male dancers, modern or classical, who do the male corps work we haven’t seen before.

For the finale, the couple returns to the gondola which is moved to the far right, and selected members of each group return for the farewells. There’s no reason people from the first act can’t also join this scene. Indeed, a few mice tumble across and land at the feet of the panthers, look up, quickly assume a passive position on the floor. The caterer and maid appear last to let us know Drosselmeyer has brought us this entertainment. He brings back young Clara and her nutcracker for a final turn before the curtain closes.

This kind of dance extravaganza is only possible in a few places like New York where there are so many kinds of dancers or Washington where embassies send their best. They’re probably also the only places with enough wealthy patrons to pay the price of admission.

Realistically, the stage manager would need to be saint. The producer’s legal firm would have gargantuan headaches getting so many prima donas to come together for such small parts and accept a Les Trocs clause, no bows during the performance. Don’t think about dressing rooms. And, as I’ve said, many of the dancers would have problems fitting their work to the Tchaikovsky score. But that union of talents is part of the fantasy that makes this a celebration of the spirit of dance.

Language - Part 3 - Politics

Political discourse is all but extinct. This year, it has gone through three phases in election advertising in my area.

In the summer, commercials ran reminding voters that one of the candidates had given money to candidates in other parties to weaken the opposition. The political tricks had been well documented at the time. Still, people complained to the station who aired the commercials forcing it to explain it was required to carry any valid political announcement. It is not clear if the complaints actually came from offended listeners, or were orchestrated by the accused politician, as an attack on anyone who dared recall hard facts.

About a week ago, the political ads aired by that radio station descended to parody with outrageous accusations against candidates from an unknown environmental group, followed by a disclaimer by a better-known group. Since no reputable political group would accuse a politician of selling horsemeat to the French or playing tapes of wounded wolves, I suspect a Machiavellian stealth campaign to build sympathy for the attacked candidate and antipathy for environmentalists.

Now we’re in the final stage of campaigning, and the commercials never mention the party affiliation of the candidates and are produced by unknown organizations, identified only by web addresses. As I head for the poll Tuesday, my head is filled with names disassociated with any useful information.

When the public arena is filled with noise signifying nothing, disquieted voters are left in a state of ennui. Since I left the academic world, I have rarely heard a political comment from any but those who repeat their daily doses of blogs. No doubt, it’s a matter of politeness, an internalized belief that one does not discuss politics or religion in public.

This year it’s different. Several friends have brought up politics, not so much to promote a candidate, but to indicate they’re uncomfortable with what’s going on and really don’t know what to do. I even had a customer begin to express anxiety about the election, until she remembered her manners and apologized.

So far the conversations have gone no farther than initial expressions of anxiety, perhaps because I haven’t made encouraging noises. I suspect I would need to act as a therapist, encouraging them to talk, like the friend who listens to the abused wife or alcoholic grope for her or his first public confession. I’m not that patient about something I care about, and I know, if I said anything, I’d more likely lapse into a diatribe which would harm the friendship.

The destruction of political discourse has gone beyond the public arena to inhibit the private one. When language is neutered so people do not understand what is going on, when any attempt to speak the truth is brutally attacked, they fall back on pre-linguistic verbal tools that express their mood without putting anything directly into words. Unconscious concerns bubble up through the reserves of articulate people and what is alluded to is more potent than words would be.

But language is our means of understanding, and without it we’re incapable of rational acts.