I’m going on about this because it’s fresh in my mind. I’m about to go to the theater to perform the lead Candy Cane in an evening performance of the Nutcracker. It’s a great role but it is quite stressful at the same time. You must get through the hoop! On the other hand, performing it is loads of fun. But one small mistake and the hoop ends up not going where it’s supposed to
I am pleased to welcome my NYCB colleague Troy Schumacher to Thoughts from the Paint. Troy works especially hard during the Nutcracker season and he has graciously taken the time to write about what it is like to dance the role of the lead Candy Cane. Enjoy! I think that one of the most fascinating things about being a dancer is the amount of preparation that goes into what we do. In many ways, preparation defines ballet itself. We spend years honing our technique in class and then maintaining our bodies outside of the studio. I wake up in the morning and do a quick abdominal exercise series and some basic stretches before I leave for work. That is the preparatory stretching to the preparatory stretching I do for 15-30 minutes before class. Then, I’m in class preparing my body for rehearsal, which is in itself a preparation for the performance. If you don’t like prep work, I wouldn’t recommend doing this!
I’m going on about this because it’s fresh in my mind. I’m about to go to the theater to perform the lead Candy Cane in an evening performance of the Nutcracker. It’s a great role but it is quite stressful at the same time. You must get through the hoop! On the other hand, performing it is loads of fun. But one small mistake and the hoop ends up not going where it’s supposed to
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I finally made it to see ABT’s Nutcracker, with choreography by Alexei Ratmansky, this week! And it is a good thing too, for next year it leaves Brooklyn for Costa Mesa California. Normally this time of year I’d have too many of my own Nutcracker shows—and I’d be way too sick of the music—to want to check out another production, so I guess I can say that my calf injury has been good for exactly one thing. Grrr. Anyway, I couldn’t believe how excited I was to experience a new riff on such a familiar ballet. Honestly, I felt as excited as one of the little kids squirming in the seats all around me during the overture. I am also a huge Ratmansky fan, and I was so curious to see what he would do with the world’s most popular ballet.
Although I very much enjoyed the evening, this was definitely my least favorite Ratmansky work to date. It was not at all bad, but it was uneven. The only other Ratmansky full-length I have seen is The Bright Stream, which I loved, so maybe I was setting the bar too high in my mind. Or maybe there’s a reason that Balanchine’s Nutcracker has become the gold standard—trademarked on the posters and all. Even though I much prefer the Balanchine version of the Nutcracker, there were several instances in which the ABT version had ours beat. I thought it would be fun to do a little City Ballet vs. ABT Nutcracker throwdown! Tis the season…? Round (Act) I A huge advantage goes to NYCB for the scrim that hangs during the overture to the ballet. We have an ornate bleuâtre drop with an angel haloed in gold hovering over a wintry village. The ABT scrim is plain blue with a tiny, simple house aslant in the corner. (As a matter of fact, some of my biggest problems with the ABT Nutcracker had to do with the sets—especially the lack of a set in Act II!) But once the curtain at BAM went up on a Downton Abbey-esque kitchen, replete with huge copper pots and hanging meats, ABT had the edge. Beginning the ballet in the kitchen smartly broke up the interminably long party scene, and it used up the music we employ for a It is that time of year again—the time that is dreaded by so much of the dance world. It is the time in which the New York City Ballet does 48 shows of the same ballet for 6 weeks, beginning the day after Thanksgiving and ending three days into the new year. Oh yes, Nutcracker season is upon us once again.
Most dancers have mixed feelings about The Nutcracker. On the one hand, we are grateful for it. It is a cash cow that funds our more experimental programs throughout the rest of the year. (People tend not to come out in droves to see Robbins’s Goldberg Variations or Balanchine’s Episodes.) It is also the first ballet that lots of us saw, and it propelled so many of us to study classical dance—myself included. (I remember watching the little girls in the Party Scene at a New Jersey Ballet Company performance at the Papermill Playhouse when I was 11 and wanting to be up there so badly!) And it is nice to play to a larger audience than we normally do, and to see the children dancing in the aisles during the matinees is absolutely adorable. On the other hand, we at City Ballet are very spoiled in that we perform a huge variety of ballets over the course of the year, with three or four different pieces going every night. It is hard work but it is never boring, whereas fifty shows of the Waltz of the Flowers can feel like Sartre’s No Exit. Days blend together, one specific group of muscles becomes overworked, the chance overhearing As I walked across Lincoln Center Plaza to see the controversial new production of The Death of Klinghoffer at the Met recently, I had to pass through a small but vocal group of protesters. The large opening night turnout of descriers—which had included former mayor Rudolph Giuliani—was reportedly dwindling as the run progressed. (Doesn’t Mr. Guiliani have a knack for landing on the wrong side in every artistic censorship debate? Just ask painter Chris Ofili, who is having a triumphant run at the New Museum after his NYC debut offering at the Brooklyn Museum was opposed by the former mayor in 1999.) That same night a banner which read “Global Hedge Fund Symposium” hung across the front of my own theater across the way. After seeing the opera, I think the demonstrators would have been far more useful protesting the group over at the Koch for the evening. But alas, some people will always choose outrage over understanding—which is, ironically, the main point of Klinghoffer.
I really enjoyed the opera, even though it had some issues: too many in-and-out characters, structural problems like awkward transitions, and a few lulls in the score. But I did not find it to be even remotely anti-Semitic, as so many have asserted. (Coincidentally, I am reading Dickens’s Oliver Twist right now, and if anyone needs clarification on anti-Semitism they should revisit the Fagin character in that!) The opera, with music by John Adams and a libretto by Alice Goodman, concerns a real-life tragedy: the 1985 terrorist hijacking of the cruise ship the Achille Lauro which culminated in the heartless murder of a wheelchair-bound American Jew, Leon Klinghoffer, by members of the Palestinian Liberation Front. The polemic around the production began before the opera even premiered at the Met, when General Manager Peter Gelb was pressured to cancel the proposed televised broadcasts of the work. A strongly worded condemnation of the opera by Leon and Marilyn Klinghoffer’s daughters, Lisa and Ilsa, is included in the Met’s program notes too. But Klinghoffer and uproar are old friends by now, for there was much ado when the opera first premiered in America at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1991 as well. This controversy was examined (and the opera defended) in an essay by Robert Fink called “Klinghoffer in Brooklyn Heights” and published in the Cambridge Opera Journal in 2005—read it here. I feel compelled to dispel the anti-Semitic charges lobbed at Klinghoffer this time around, for they are completely unfounded and I think it is a powerful work that deserves a place in the repertory. The fact that the story is true makes it all the more emotionally wrenching, so I could certainly |
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