Ballet is hard, change is harder

In a recent interview (http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/feb/12/ballet-grand-dames-gillian-lynne-bery-grey-push-dancers-limit) , Beryl Grey and Gillian Lynne, former Royal Ballet stars now in their eighties, criticized the culture of contemporary ballet for coddling dancers, for making them soft through such pampering treatment as nutritional counseling, physical therapy, and rest days. Never mind that more dancers are maintaining longer careers and retiring with mental and physical health intact these days than ever in the past; these lionesses protest that they worked longer days and longer seasons on starvation wages and were glad to do it. “Ballet is hard,” they say. 

Beryl Grey

I have immense respect for these women, who were indeed tough-as-nails swans in their day; it takes a certain degree of fortitude to compete with Margot Fonteyn. However, their griping is just more of that “in my day, we had to walk uphill in the snow BOTH ways,” self-aggrandizement that Saturday Night Live made such good fun of years ago. In fact, dance has changed in ways that would make the hours they worked crippling and I find it hard to regret that artists are now accorded the some of the same prerogatives as other working athletes. I cannot imagine a retired NBA player decrying the fact that players today have access to ultrasound therapy for strained muscles. And as for the talk of dieting and the valorization of anorexia, I am sorry, but how does being physically weak and mentally ill make you a better, more expressive artist?

The athleticism of modern ballet also comes under fire from Grey and Lynne on the grounds that dancers, though technically more skilled and versatile today, are less “soulful.” Codswallop! This is another one of those commonplaces rooted in cheap nostalgia and, I suspect, an insidiously anti-feminist, class- and race- based set of expectations about the ballerina. She should be delicate, pale, trembling, a veritable wraith (a Sylphide!). Visibly muscular women, women of color, tall women, none of these have a place in the Victorian imaginarium in which traditional classical ballet was for so long invested. But more and more, the color of the ballerina, and along with that, the range of acceptable body types, is becoming more open to difference.

This week, I am in Chicago, and I was able to sneak away from the conference I am attending to see a performance by the Joffrey Ballet at the historic Auditorium Theater, just a few blocks from the hotel. All three works performed on the triple bill http://joffrey.org/contemporary were of relatively recent genesis: Crossing Ashland, by Brock Clawson, Continuum, by Christopher Wheeldon, and Episode 31, by Alexander Ekman. Each of them had a distinctly different relationship to classical ballet, with Clawson closest in his investigation of using the body as an emotional glyph to European choreographers, like Jiri Kylian,  Wheeldon typically hewing close to Balanchine’s starker neo-classical idiom, and Ekman more kindred in spirit to Bob Fosse (if Bob Fosse took speed and went clubbing in the 1990s).  What all three works shared is that incredibly technical and percussive athleticism that I have commented on before in writing about contemporary ballet. 

Ballet dancers today, unlike in Grey and Lynne’s time, are routinely asked to use their bodies in a huge variety of very risky and unfamiliar ways, hurtling through space, colliding with the floor, dragging and dragged, stomping, falling… For example, in Ekman’s piece, the central pas-de-deux involves two men in stocking feet, moving to a spoken-word recording of children’s poetry that sounded like it was from the 1950s, and their interactions compound martial-arts-like combat, contact-improv like rolls, and lifts drawn from the classical repertoire, except made more challenging by the fact that one is lifting a 150 pound man, not a 100 pound woman. Yet this strange passage was, for me, the most compelling part of this odd, wacky ballet; it got at the desire and the anxiety at the heart of ritual combat (wrestling, boxing, dance-offs) between men while at the same time infusing this potentially murky stew with a dash of peppery self-mockery. In other words, it was emotionally, as well as physically challenging for the dancers.

Karel Cruz and Maria Chapman, PNB, in
Wheeldon's After the Rain.

I am surprised that Grey and Lynne and the legions of other more conservative dance observers who repeat the same old saw about today’s athleticism in dance coming at the cost of emotional expression can overlook the entire oeuvres of such choreographers as Pina Bausch (on the one hand) and Christopher Wheeldon (on the other). Wheeldon’s work, in particular, has always struck me as sailing dangerously close to the wind in terms of soppy romance. I will not lie. I adore watching After the Rain, especially the more sensual second act, but that enjoyment is always tinged with my awareness that this might just be the corniest and most sugar-coated ballet romance since, well, since Giselle. Plus there is the whole weird racial thing; it is usually cast with a white woman and a dark-skinned man (it was originally set on Wendy Wheeldon and Jock Soto) -- I would like to see this discussed and maybe challenged a bit more. What about casting say, Misty Copeland in the woman's role, or just ANY different pairing than white woman/"black" man? Alistair Macauley has criticized Wheeldon for his heterosexism in his preference for the pas-de-deux, but even he doesn't plumb the really troubling race politics at issue in the bizarrely conformist casting of After the Rain.

Barnett Newman, The Beginning, image from
The Art Institute of Chicago website

It is possible, indeed even probable, within the modernist idiom of any art form, to tend toward a kind of dewy-eyed romanticism, and Wheeldon is for me the dance-equivalent of Mark Rothko; deeply saturated fields of emotional color thinned out and merging into dark tones around the edges, the classical core breaking up into cloud-wisps, the light fading. Continuum, set to Ligety’s unrelentingly modernist piano music, has the same structural rigor as a painting by Rothko, or actually, more like something by Barnett Newman, that echt-technician of Abstract Expressionism, whose 1946 The Beginning I had seen earlier on the same day that I saw the Joffrey. It is, like Continuum, both spare and lush. Oh yes, and it shares the same color palette.

If you take So You Think You Can Dance as a gauge of “what dance has become” it is indeed the case that athleticism and technical prowess have trumped the deeper, affective and intellectual pleasures of the art form. However, that is a product of the particular strictures of the television dance-competition form; those young dancers (many of them no doubt deeply engaged with dance and capable of far more reflective and mindful expression under other circumstances) have to learn new choreography very quickly, and they are not given time to develop much of a relationship to either the movement or the music, both of which are in any case often vapid. Any "emoting" they do is very superficial and often tied to the uber-cheesy "lyrical" pieces set to pop ballads.

However, in real contemporary dance, athleticism is just one brush in an ever expanding (and ever more physically and intellectually demanding) quiver that artists are expected to bring to the studio. When you think about the disconnect between the ballet training that most kids get in this country, with its emphasis on traditional forms and technical mastery, and the feats of imagination and strength that are asked of professionals in a company like the Joffrey, the fact that dancers can identify and make visible the affective qualities of the very difficult choreography they are asked to perform is all the more impressive.

"Bah, humbug!"

Not all of them can do it. There was one dancer in the Wheeldon piece who seemed too happy; she just grinned and beamed like a showgirl the whole time and it drove me nuts since it meant she did not engage with her pas-de-deux partner so much as with the audience. But that lack of emotional sensitivity is in fact so rare among dancers I have seen in recent years that it stood out. 

In the end, as we age, we have choices. We can look at what the world is becoming and marvel at it, try to wrap our minds around the possibilities it offers, try to articulate the challenges it presents, and try to stay relevant. At forty-five, no longer young but facing what I hope is a long future of being not-young, I can only hope I have the courage to take this route. Having spent a week at this conference where the up-and-comers in my field look so bright and fresh and daring, I have had to be quite firm with myself about singing that tired old tune of “Well, back in my day…”

And that is option number two: we can turn up our noses and sniff about the inferiority of the moment in which we now live to the world of our youth. There is nothing so repellent as an old snob.

Back to the Barre

Barbara Morgan, Martha Graham and Erick Hawkins
at Bennington College, 1938. Silver gelatin print.
Haggerty Museum, Marquette University, Milwaukee

 

The Bunhead has been on ballet vacation for three weeks and it is just about killing her. Okay, she did a little home-cooked version of barre and lots of stretching and sit ups over the holidays, but the number of cookies, slices of tart, and second helpings of all-too-delicious dinners far outstrips the number of pliés and tendus, I fear. Most winters, I have turned to my sizeable collection of workout videos, but because we recently moved our television into a room with a large picture window that faces the street, I no longer feel comfortable working out in front of it. And, let me be frank, I hate workout videos. There, I said it.

Monday, however, signals the resumption of ballet normality, and it simply cannot come soon enough. Somehow, shopping for leotards online does not give the same satisfaction as sweating through grand allegro in the studio.

In the interim, I have tried to do some reading about dance. Joan Acocella has an article in this week’s New Yorker about talent, new and old, choreographic and performative, at the Alvin Ailey Company (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/dancing/2014/01/06/140106crda_dancing_acocella ).  And I just pre-ordered CarlosAcosta’s first novel, called Pig’s Foot from Amazon for my Kindle (makes reading while husband sensibly sleeps feasible). We shall see! 

Also, I bookmarked both Dance Magazine and Pointe, and started reading articles there. Three things I have learned are:

 1.      Rolling on one of those foam cylinders before you stretch can really help break up adhesions and loosen fascia, making one more limber. 

2.      Wendy Wheelan is only a year younger than I am (!) 

3.      These are not really very profound sources of information or criticism about the dance world; while more substantial than say, People, they are a little on the fluffy side.

 # 3 sent me looking (on JSTOR, Project Muse and farther afield) for better, more in-depth things to read. I found that Carol Lee’s Ballet in Western Culture: A History of Its Origins and Evolution  was oft-cited, so I think I will find a copy of that to plow through at some point.  

Inspired by a free copy of Dance Research Journal that I acquired at a publisher’s bookstand at a conference last year, I also browsed through back issues. My favorite is Volume 42, number 1, Summer 2010, a special issue dedicated to “States of the Body.” In it, an article by Henrietta Bannerman (whose author biography states that she “is head of research at London Contemporary Dance School” and has a PhD in Contemporary Dance… wow, they actually take dance seriously over there in the UK) entitled “Martha Graham’s House of the Pelvic Truth: The Figuration of Sexual Identities and Female Empowerment,” really caught my attention. 

Evidently, Martha Graham’s company members and students facetiously called her studio “the House of the Pelvic Truth,” a phrase coined by Graham, more seriously, to describe the way in which she conceptualized the “seed” of her movement vocabulary. Bannerman relates her own experience as a Graham student of coming to terms with the floor exercises that emphasized contraction and release. I remember feeling so embarrassed when we were instructed to do those pelvic thrusts in modern dance class when I was an adolescent. I wish someone had explained the purpose of the drills to me then as lucidly as she does. She writes, “Within the neutralized context of the dance studio, one aim of the contraction during the floor work is to sensitize the body for emotional expression—the acts of laughing, sobbing, anger, fear, but not necessarily sex.”

And sometimes a pelvic thrust is just comical.

One thread that runs through the scholarship  in DRJ is iconology, that is, the assumption that the forms of dance are symbolic, meaning rich, socially embedded, and (probably also) unstable. Bannerman’s ultimate argument, it seems to me, is that while there is something distinctly louche about the phrase “house of the pelvic truth,” in fact Graham’s modernist project is far more sophisticated than much of the reductive reportage tying her sexuality and her libidinous activities to her choreography and her technique might indicate. Sometimes a pelvic thrust is erotic, indeed, but just as often, it alludes to grief, to budding self-awareness, to determination in the face of adversity, all depending on context.

Ballet, of course, has an entirely different relationship to the pelvis, which is less engine than fulcrum of movement. I like to think that in classical ballet the pelvis is the point of caesura between the dense and complicated prose of the legs and the lyric verse of the torso, arms, neck, and head. Its stillness is not passive, but purposeful, and in its way just as expressive and allusive as the dynamism of the Graham pelvis. 

Snap! Crackle! Pop!

As for me and my pelvis, I fully expect those first pliés on Monday night to be crepitous, as I contemplate whether I ought to have rolled on my foam cylinder some more before class and marvel that Wendy Wheelan, at nearly my age, gets up and does this every single morning, and all day long. I doubt very much I will be thinking of the emotive, expressive potential of my hips, sacrum, or any other body part. Instead, I will be ruefully remembering all those second helpings and gingerbread biscuits and slices of Brie, and wondering if just maybe that leotard I ordered online will arrive by Wednesday night’s class.

Dancing on the Sacred Ground (highbrow dance on TV)

I went to college in western Massachusetts, but at that time in my life I was very far away from dance, trying to get it out of my system (but still doing pirouettes in the kitchen when no one was watching). This really is a shame because it means I never went to Jacob's Pillow, never applied to work there as a summer intern (or a cook), and thus I missed out on the opportunity to see, just to name a few:

 

The opening and closing image of the documentary

• Laura Dean 
• Mark Morris
• Hubbard Street Dance Company 
• Judith Jamison  
• Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane & Company 
• Merce Cunningham
• Trish Brown

The list goes on and on. Fortunately, by the time I went to graduate school I had come to realize that one could go and be in the audience at a dance performance and not spend the whole time feeling regretful. Berkeley brought in a lot of good companies, and student tickets were if not cheap relatively affordable.

But I missed Jacob's Pillow, and for that I am sorry. I just watched this very well made documentary from Dancing at Jacob's Pillow -- Never Stand Still that aired last summer (but that is still streaming on the PBS website) that follows the history of the site and has tons of fabulous footage of performances, workshops, and rehearsals by dancers of every stripe. What really struck me was how "the Pillow" becomes a kind of United Nations of movement, with everything from experimental approaches to Brazilian social dance to multimedia performance art, classical ballet to slapstick (Bill T. Jones narrates).

That's my kind of place.

To me it sounds like heaven on earth, a place to live and breathe dance amidst the not-inconsiderable beauties of the Berkshires, a place where the audience is likely to be as possessed by dance as are the dancers. I think one might have to go back to Greek theater to find a parallel situation where the performers and the audience alike are essentially votaries dedicated to something much bigger than themselves, something powerful and weird and transporting

The word that springs to mind, listening to Suzanne Farrell or Paul Taylor, or Judith Jamison, or any one of the other luminaries interviewed in the film, is enthusiasm. They are deeply, seriously enthusiastic in its primal sense,of rapturously possessed by a force larger than the individual self. And dance does inspire that kind of ecstatic devotion; this is just as true of Abby Miller and her crew of dance moms as it is of whirling Dervishes, though in very different ways.

Because too much is never enough when one is an enthusiast, I also had to watch this Great Performances film of Paul Taylor Dance Company in Paris, which aired last spring. I saw them once at Zellerbach Hall, and I do not remember the program but I do remember walking away feeling stunned by how effortlessly his dancers seemed to produce movement at extremely high voltage for sustained periods of time. The first half of the film features Brandenburgs, which he describes in a little interview segment as being about "gallantry."

It is (of course) set to Bach, and who can resist the Brandenburg Concertos? Well, not I, anyway. The costumes must be mentioned too; they were designed by Santo Loquasto and they are absolutely perfectly in harmony with the choreography, the music, and the serious fun of the piece. The materials are rich and velvety, trimmed with gold, but not ostentatious or flashy -- both in cut and hue they remind me of later sixteenth-century court dress, with its somber colors and austere tailoring belying the incredible expense of the materials. The colors, too, seem at once sober and sumptuous; all of the dancers wear jewel-like greens ranging from peridot for the main male dancer, to deep emerald for the male corps, and a sort of mossy, dark jade for the three women, whose skirts must be cut on the bias to move as they do, like water.

Parisa Khobdeh

As for the choreography, you really just have to see it. Taylor is so adept at striking a balance between the classically trained bodies of his dancers and the vocabulary of "classic" modern dance while also throwing in these wonderful little cadenzas of more vernacular, almost Buster-Keatonish awkwardness. So, for example, in the final ensemble movement, the dancers are arrayed on the stage in a echt-Petipa inverted wedge, doing classical pirouettes and beaten jumps at a staggering pace (well, I would be staggering), throwing in a sequence of Graham-esque semi-contracted développés (while turning, natch), and then they suddenly interject this funny little phrase that I can only describe as wobbling like a Weeble, all while grinning broadly. They are having so much fun that I wanted to do a sort of Alice-through-the-flatscreen thing and join them up there. Whooooheee!

Michael Trusnovec clearly never works out.

What amazing artists. And they are also among the most beautiful people I have ever seen. The lead male dancer, one of Taylor's stars, is Michael Trusnovec, and though his official biography on the company's website claims that he is from Yaphank, on Long Island, this must be wrong. He was actually not born, but carved from marble and placed on the pediment of a mid-fifth century BCE temple to Apollo, but at some point got enthused and now appears to have more muscles, sinews, and contours in his chest, back, and abdomen (he is shirtless) than anatomically possible. Meanwhile Parisa Khobdeh claims to be from Plano but looks like she walked in through the door from Middle Earth, where she, and not Liv Tyler, was the real
Arwen.

The second half of the program is a ballet dedicated to Walt Whitman, and featuring the music of Poulenc. Very different, but also very moving. Watch these films! You will not feel you have wasted your time.

Cracking the Nut

My musicologist friend Chris once related to me this theory that his doctoral advisor has about Tchaikovsky’s score for the Nutcracker, in which the musical themes of the Grand Pas-de-Deux and the final Waltz and Apotheosis indicate the death of the young heroine. Now I have seen many and many a Nutcracker, ranging from the haunting, pared down Baryshnikov/ABT rendition captured in the 1977 film starring MB and Gelsey Kirkland, to the very traditional and true-to-libretto, Royal Winnipeg account, to the kooky, Sendak-designed PNB extravaganza, to Mark Morris’ Hard Nut, as well as multiple performances by different companies of the more garden variety version. And in not a single one of these various accounts does Clara/Marie expire. Well, maybe with Baryshnikov she comes close – the Grand Pas-de-Deux there is so erotic and swoony that one thinks perhaps that Clara is experiencing the little death, if not the big Death. And then she floats away, thanks to movie magic.

So I started to wonder, as my Thanksgiving-induced brain fog subsided, was this deathliness and darkness in the original story? And could Tchaikovsky have been responding, in his music, to the written text?

 

 E.T.A Hoffmann wrote the ersatz fairy tale of “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” in 1816, at the

height of the Romantic era. I had always thought that this was the source of the ballet libretto, but in fact, a short and not very scholarly search through the literature on the Nutcracker (which turns out to be fairly substantial) reveals that this is not the case. The story was translated into French and adapted to the more bourgeois and staid tastes of mid-nineteenth-century Paris by Alexandre Dumas (père); he took out the really weird parts and toned down the original’s ambiguity, according to most of the things I read. It was his version that Petipa liberally adapted in creating the libretto for the 1892 ballet.

Whether the heroine is Marie Stahlbaum (as in Hoffmann) or Clara Silberhaus (as in Dumas), or some compound of the two, all the ballet versions that I know of, except for the PNB/Sendak account, cut out the long flashback, as told by Drosselmeyer to Clara/Marie, of the Nutcracker’s tragic origin, and get straight to the business of his wounding by a jealous Fritz (transformed into a naughty little brother from the older playmate of the Hoffmann story), his close run battle with the Mouse King, Clara/Marie’s heroic intervention, the passage into a wonderland via a snowy woodland, and a long, happy display of visual candy before the dream dissipates and the little girl awakes in the real world, very much alive. 

I would have to re-watch the 1977 ABT film (no penance there) to be certain, but even that version ends with the implication that she wakes from a wonderful dream sad, but not dead. In the PNB version, which retains the story of Princess Pirlipat as well as other elements of the Hoffmann tale not featured in the standard ballet libretto, Marie (played in the party scene by a little girl, but in the end of Act I and throughout Act II by a prima ballerina), returns to her childish form, and wakes up disoriented and dismayed, but very much alive.

In several versions I have seen, Drosselmeyer is played with a certain, serio-comic, creepiness that extends to his relationship with the pre-adolescent heroine (especially noticeable when the adult, but childlike Kirkland dances Clara); the taint of inappropriate sexual desire lends an acid undertone to the cloying sweetness of the ballet, with its sugarplums and bonbons galore. The story, in its bare outlines, could always be read as a  parable about a young girl’s first love and her coming of age; Clara/Marie discovers her agency (by throwing her shoe at a mouse), conquers her fears, saves her prince, and enjoys the rewards.

For PNB’s version, Sendak and company went back to the Hoffmann story for inspiration, rather like

redactors of the Bible going back to the Aramaic and Hebrew sources. Clearly, they found something there that suggested to them this transformation. While Marie is played in Act I Scene I by a child (albeit a fantastically talented child), when she rises from her faint at the end of the battle in Scene II she is an adult. To me, that’s the ballet responding to the Hoffmann original’s strange treatment of its heroine. At the beginning Hoffmann tells us that Marie is the youngest of her family of three children, and that she is seven years old. However, somewhere in the course of events, she becomes the “lady” of a medieval romance, loved and desired by the Nutcracker Prince, who prefers to wear her favor into battle, and who ultimately consents to marry him, in his human form as the nephew of her godfather. Or does she? The line between the child’s imagination, reality, and allegory fluctuates and dodges in Hoffmann’s story; the reader is never quite allowed to know where she stands.

But the death thing? I listened for that this time, while the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier spun about, smiling so hard you might think their faces would crack. In comes the harp, with a series of rising and falling arpeggios, and then the strings, cascading down, lilting, aching. Yup. Something tragic there. The second theme, introduced by the oboe floating in way up high, followed by the clarinet answering, is absolutely delicious, but not like a sweet. Rather, it’s a clear, slightly fizzing drink, a little intoxicating… very quickly this becomes a swoony, big-moment, full on Romantic swell of musical feeling, with the strings urging everything forward and the horns and the tympani crashing out affect, the piccolos twittering in distress, and then finally it all wraps up with a big drumroll and some blasts from the brass. So is this death? Or that other thing so often compared to death? Or just the way a child feels when the dream of total self-indulgence is shattered by the intrusion of the real?

 

I am not a musicologist, so I am just going on intuition, notoriously misleading here, but I would have to

say that Tchaikovsky is definitely giving us the end of something big. The waltz that follows immediately upon the Grand Pas de Deux is almost manically cheerful, as if it is trying to banish all that darkness and messiness and humanity from the ear and replace it with a big, showy wedding cake. But I do like the way in the ABT film that Baryshnikov made the Grand Pas a lovers’ duet into which Drosselmeyr intrudes, ending the enchantment; all this cannot last, he seems to say.

Which takes me back to Hoffmann’s story. There love and beauty are inexorably linked to suffering, as when her godfather tells the little girl, who is beside herself at being called a liar, “Dear Marie, you were born a princess like Pirlipat, for you rule a bright and beautiful land. But you will have to suffer much if you are to look after Nutcracker, for the Mouse King will pursue him in every land across every border.” 

His prediction proves true – the Mouse King is not above extortion, appearing to Marie at night and making demands. She has to give up all her Christmas candy to protect her beloved Nutcracker, and worse, her sugar dolls, including “Joan of Arc, whom Marie did not particularly care about,” and “a red-cheeked child” who is surely a confectionary version of herself.  The Mouse King even demands that she sacrifice her Christmas dress – which the “Christ Child had given her” – and her picture books. At this point, the Nutcracker, now for some reason bleeding actively like some saintly stigmatic, comes briefly to life to tell her not to keep giving up her pretty things, but instead to find him a sword. 

And even after the Mouse King lies dead, Hoffmann does not let the reader off the hook; Marie may gawp, awestruck and admiring of her prince’s kingdom, but he himself retains a less-than-sanguine outlook. For example, in Gingerbreadholm on the Honey River, he tells her that the people are “nice to look at, but they’re in terrible moods because they suffer from toothaches.”  Rot! Decay! Crankiness!

Even more mordantly, upon the pair’s arrival in the wondrous Confectionary City (which struck me as the pattern for Oz in many ways), Hoffmann gives us a totally bizarre scene, like something out of Dante’s Purgatory, in which a ridiculously assorted quartet of faux-allegorical processions comes into conflict in the city’s central square, before an obelisk made of cake. Just as the squabble is heating up and heads are starting to roll, however, someone shouts out “Candyman!” and everyone falls silent and still, into deep reverie. In a matter-of-fact way, the prince explains that the Candyman is a mysterious power that controls the destiny and ultimately ordains the destruction of all the people of Candyland, and upon hearing the name, the citizens must cease their doings and contemplate  “what is the nature of man, and what is his fate?” 

Pieter Bruegel, The Land of Cockaigne, 1567. Sausages and gluttony also figure prominently in Hoffmann's story.

Forces of destruction are everywhere present, while Marie marvels and gapes. In another aside, the prince relates how, not that long ago, the giant Sweettooth nearly devoured the Marzipan Castle, but was deterred by the sacrifice of Marmelade Grove, an entire district of the city. 

The final episode of the story, in which the real-life version of the Nutcracker comes to Marie’s house and proposes marriage to her, reads wry and fey; how old is she? And what does it mean for a little girl from a bourgeois family in early 19^th century Nuremburg to go off and rule as “the queen of a country in which shimmering Christmas forests and glazed marzipan castles… can be seen, if only you look”? 

That last statement, which could be read straight as a kind of “believe, dream, fly” kind of cheese-ball mysticism, is in fact probably the trickiest thing in the whole, strange Hoffmann tale. Marie’s kingdom is a chimera, an illusion, visible only to the eyes of those immersed in fantasy, which could be a good thing (the Romantic view) or a dangerous thing (the rationalist view), or simply a thing that screens the real ugliness of the world from view (the pragmatic view, maybe?). In this case, perhaps Marie is really dead, or mad, and Hoffmann is telling us so, obliquely, by saying that you might choose to imagine her absence in terms of ruling a fantastic kingdom, which is nicer, but less truthful.

The Nutcracker it seems, exists to be interpreted. In the words of Newman Levy’s “Bluebeard,” “The ordinary story isn’t gory, it’s a jest!” But the extraordinary story (Hoffmann’s, Baryshnikov’s) seems to mine deep veins of what you might call romantic realism beneath the candy-coating. Love hurts, sweetness harms, dreams disappoint and delude us… now there’s a charming little Christmas story!

Next up for the Portlandia rats? "The Nutcracker -- a Rodent's Eye view"?