Broken Frontier

Even if you’ve never seen a ballet before, you’ve heard of The Nutcracker. It’s possibly the most popular ballet of all time, played in thousands of cities around the holidays. It’s the story of a young girl named Clara, who receives a very special Christmas present and has a fantastic dream of adventure and romance, and of a broken toy nutcracker that comes alive. As classic as this ballet has become, it is drastically different from the original short story from which it was adapted. Originally, it was called The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, and was written as a creepy tale by romantic author (that’s romantic as in Frankenstein, not Harlequin) E. T. A. Hoffman.

This dark story was adapted by Alexandre Dumas, and subsequently adapted into the classic ballet by Marius Petipa with choreography by ballet-master, Lev Ivanov. Undoubtedly, you have heard some of Tchaikovsky’s score (some samples of which are available here) even if you didn’t know it. In many instances, the ballet has been called a cultural cliché, as ubiquitous as It’s a Wonderful Life or Jingle Bell Rock. Still, there’s something about this ballet that endures.

My first exposure to The Nutcracker wasn’t through a local ballet company, but through the Mark Morris Dance Company video of The Hard Nut, which featured designs by post-underground comics artist Charles Burns. I was just getting into dance classes in college, and really knew nothing about the various productions that every young dancer around the world had performed in. What drew me to the video was the cover, with Charles Burns’ typically hard-edged retro style. The video dates back to 1992, so it was years before Burns released his eerie award-winning graphic novel Black Hole, but some time after he’d contributed to Raw or done his oddball Hardboiled Defective Tales. There was for me something really familiar about his work, and it drew me to The Hard Nut like I’d never been drawn to a ballet before. 

It has been years, fifteen in fact, since I watched that video, but I found my copy while rummaging through my basement and thought it would be interesting to watch it again during the Christmas season. Seeing it again, Mark Morris introduces the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, in Brussels, where The Hard Nut was first introduced. He announces a production of The Nutcracker that would more closely follow Hoffman’s original story. The character of Clara would be renamed Marie, as in the original Hoffman story, and the scary parts would be left intact.

“The idea for the production came from Charles Burns, the great comics artist,” says Morris in his video introduction, “Burns’ world is not the cozy nineteenth century of most Nutcrackers. It’s the world of the 1960s and 70s, the time when he and I were growing up. The people don’t in this valley don’t wear frock coats – they wear bellbottoms, and everything looks flat and bold and clear, like a comic book.”

It might be interesting to compare The Hard Nut to a couple of productions that aired on PBS this weekend, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s American Ballet Theatre production from 1977 (choreographed for video) and the much more recent production by Ballet International. Compared to the pastels of the ABT production or the warm tones of the Ballet International, Adrianne Lobel’s set design and Alan Adelmen’s lighting look positively stark. Placing Martin Pakledinaz’s costumes in the mix sets off against both of those in a bold way that seems to capture the style of the iconoclastic Charles Burns.

Where the two other productions seem to have a strong focus on the technical virtuosity of their performers, Morris’ choreography takes a more whimsical approach to the dancing. During the party scene, the dancers form a soul train. During the waltz of the flowers the dancers roll around on the floor. Yet, one of the biggest challenges Morris undertook was that of gender casting. The snowflake scene, traditionally danced by girls, is danced by both men and women all wearing similar tutus and bursting with snow-like confetti. There’s quite a bit of drag-costuming in the production and even a practice that would be considered anathema to most ballet teachers at the time: male dancers en pointe.

Since this production, a movement has grown to get more men dancing on their toes. Not so much with regard to the drag.

Another significant difference is the lack of children in the cast of The Hard Nut. Considering that many young dancers first cut their teeth on a production of The Nutcracker, perhaps it could be said that Morris aimed to make his production a bit more grown up.

In case you have never had the opportunity to read Hoffman’s original story, included here is a short excerpt. After a mouse crept and bit the infant princess Perlipat:

Perlipat awoke with the noise, and wept aloud. "Thank heaven," said the nurses, "she lives!" But what was their horror, when, on looking at the before beautiful child, they saw the change which had taken place in her! Instead of the lovely white and red cheeks which she had had before, and the shining golden hair, there was now a great deformed head on a little withered body; the blue eyes had changed into a pair of great green gogglers, and the mouth had stretched from ear to ear. The queen was almost mad with grief and vexation, and the walls of the king's study were obliged to be wadded, because he was always dashing his head against them for sorrow, and crying out, "O luckless monarch!"
- From an excerpt of the translation by William Makepeace Thackeray.

Besides revisiting Hoffman’s scary prose, it’s clear that Morris was a fan of Burns’ art. In the opening sequence Marie’s sister Louise browses through a copy of Hardboiled Defective Tales, as the kids in the family watch TV in the living room, with Burns’ cartoon version of their Godfather Drosselmeier blazing large enough for the audience to see. The male dancers swagger onstage, drunken lotharios. The party rages as it might have been in the 1970s, in full swing so to speak.

There are some clever bits of pop culture, as during the battle between the Nutcracker and the Mouse king, the Mouse King wears the garb of another King, Elvis. The toy soldiers in that fight are dressed like GI Joes. It’s a really unique production, and a show that has since been restaged year after year.

In an interview with Julie Bloom of the Daily Californian in the year 2000, Morris tells a bit more about his collaboration with Burns: “I called [Charles Burns] and we worked together. I decided how things should look. I liked the look of his comic book art. There is real horror in the original E.T.A. Hoffman story, and I wanted to capture that - Burns's visual aesthetic is fabulous.” 

In that same interview with the Daily Californian, Morris also reveals one of his motivations: “It's the music that matters. That's why I did The Hard Nut, because of the score. To dancers and Americans, the music has become so familiar, numbing. I wanted to shake the dust off.”

Shake the dust off, he did. In his work to re-invigorate one of the holiday season’s unavoidable classics, Morris also pushed boundaries the boundaries of gender and the assumptions up until that point hadn’t been questioned in the dance world. Yet, his productions remains true to the original themes of The Nutcracker – if you love something very much, it comes alive.