Patric Palkens & Maizyalet Velázquez (Peter Mueller)
The weather is getting colder. Black Friday sale ads are everywhere. Just the other day, I heard Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” at Target. Now the final holiday horseman has arrived, as The Cincinnati Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker comes to The Kennedy Center this week.
Artistic Director Victoria Morgan has been with the company for 20 years, but this will be the Cincinnati Ballet’s Kennedy Center debut. Morgan has a long personal history with this Christmas perennial.
“I was in The Nutcracker every year since I was eight years old, except for one year where I was injured,” Morgan said. “So, thirteen to thirty five performances a year. I’m 65. How many is that?”
The Nutcracker has long been prominent fixture in North American ballet. According to Morgan, the show makes up something like 50 percent of ticket sales for most ballet companies she knows, regardless of size. In 2010, The New York Times ran an infamous piece indicting the show’s necessity as an income source for companies, positing that its ubiquity has stunted the evolution of modern dance.
But The Nutcracker is more than a populist staple. It’s also something of a recruitment tool.
“It’s also a huge educator,” Morgan pointed out. “I would say 90 percent of my board members, the first time they started thinking about dance or thinking it was interesting or got exposure to it from The Nutcracker. Administrators, too. And if you talk to any of the dancers, I bet 95 percent of them, their first experience on stage was through The Nutcracker.”
Because every company has their own version of this holiday mainstay, Morgan and her collaborators had to find ways to make this one unique to the Cincinnati Ballet.
“John Ezell is our set designer and he picked ideas that were sort of the base of the structure of interior design from the mid 1800s. He’d pick the lace from a tablecloth that would be typical for that era, then he’d blow it up, and that lace design would be the wallpaper in the rooms. So, there’s kind of a reference to tradition, but also a breaking down. It’s not a contemporary Nutcracker at all, but there’s more of an informality about it.”
(Peter Mueller)Though the show is not a contemporary re-telling, certain modern elements are present that offer a variety to the somewhat staid strictures of traditional expectation.
“In Cincinnati, there’s a lovely hip-hop company called Elementz,” Morgan said. “Since our mice in the show have some hip-hop style to their choreography, we had someone from Elementz come work with our dancers. Just little surprises along the way.”
Perhaps what’s most fascinating are the unconscious creative decisions that informed Morgan’s conception of The Nutcracker. In some ways, the simple act of putting on a show so ingrained in the lifeblood of dance taps into a shared cultural memory.
“When you’re actually choreographing, there are things that just come into your body and you don’t know where it comes from,” Morgan said. “Then you realize, this is how I was doing this role years ago in some other production. It’s sort of creepy and spooky and really interesting that you have this subconscious access in the creative act.”
That’s really what this holiday tradition is about, making and reinventing memories for new audiences, who then in turn might do the same in some other theater in some other Christmas season. Maybe some people still experience Nutcracker fatigue, as we all tend to with holiday touchstones, but there’s an underlying sweetness that can’t be denied. Seeing a production can be like a time machine to a formative moment, even for Morgan herself.
“The role that every young girl wants is the role of Clara. I was offered that role, but in those days I had braces on my teeth,” Morgan recalled. “So the ballet mistress told me I couldn’t have the role because the audience wouldn’t be able to see my smile. But my father organized it to have my braces off for two weeks so I could be Clara in The Nutcracker. It was painful, but so worth it.”
The Nutcracker runs from November 23 through November 27th at The Kennedy Center Opera House. Buy tickets here.
