Fokine family Nutcrackers: a trio of productions shows holiday favorite's Russian roots - Irine Fokine

Dance Magazine, Dec, 2002 by Wendy Perron

The overture to The Nutcracker is playing, and I know every note. I am onstage with four other dancers, with that delicious feeling that the magic is about to begin. Finally we hear the opening strains of the first act, with its pleasantly simmering music, and the curtain opens, finding President and Mme. Silberhaus, Clara and Fritz, and their maid (me) decorating the tree. I've worked hard all year to get the parts I want, and have spent every Saturday and Sunday for months rehearsing at the studio of the Irine Fokine School of Ballet in New Jersey. I love this ballet.

Irine Fokine, niece of the great choreographer Michel Fokine, produces her forty-fifth Nutcracker this December. With a cast of sixty students and a handful of guest artists, the ballet is a major cultural event in northern New Jersey. Through her mother, Alexandra Fedorova (see page 62), her Nutcracker traces a direct line to the original Ivanov/Petipa production in 1892 in St. Petersburg. And, keeping it all in the family, her daughters, Nina Marlow and Donna Decker, produce sister Nutcrackers in other parts of the country.

Fokine performed in her first Nutcracker as a child, playing one of the Nutcracker's sisters, but she barely remembers it. The production she does remember was at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, where her mother had staged a one-act version for Serge Denham's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1940.

Her first reaction was awe at seeing Igor Youskevitch dance. "I was a kid, sitting with my mouth open, and completely in love with him. For me, nobody else matters, never did, never will."

Fokine went to work on her own production in 1957, seven years after she opened her school in Ridgewood, New Jersey. "I went right by the score. I remembered so much of it. I probably asked my mother questions." Not everyone was thrilled with the project. "A good friend said, `Why are you doing that? It will never go.' And it went for forty-five years !" Fokine has kept it basically as she learned it from the Ballet Russe, but makes small changes every year. "I try to polish it, add a little bit of this and subtract that. It has become cleaner and better."

The grand pas de deux, however, is sacred. "The Sugar Plum is as exact as I could get it. This I don't change," she proclaimed. She has kept the swooning climax, when the Cavalier rocks the arched Sugar Plum Fairy like a pendulum, the back of her head almost sweeping the floor.

In order to maintain a high technical caliber, Fokine has always hired a professional male dancer for the Cavalier and "Snow" roles. About fifteen years ago, she also hired a guest female dancer for the Sugar Plum Fairy. For the last several years, the lead couple has been Slawomir Wozniak, a principal dancer with Poland's National Ballet in Warsaw, and Kat Wildish, a former dancer with both American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet who now teaches at Broadway Dance Center. Others who have guested include Alexander Filipov, Ted Kivitt, Ali Pourfarrokh, and William Forsythe.

A high point of her show is Mother Ginger. Played as a flamboyant drag act by Andrew Wentink, who is also a dance historian and archivist, the role has developed into a hilarious scene over the last twenty-one years. He goads the Polichinelles to be naughty and outwit her, and when they are dancing politely downstage, he swirls his gigantic skirt upstage as though carried away with the music. At the end they rush to her and brazenly rustle her skirts. Says Wentink, "To keep myself interested, I started adding things, and Irine let me do it. Mother Ginger has become a real character who interacts with the Polichinelles. It makes them perform better because, at that age, if they ever have a chance to steal the show, that's the number to do it in."

Fokine, 80, still teaches at least ten classes a week and swims daily. After forty-five years of Nutcracker, she has the rehearsal schedule down to a science. The students audition in early October (in my day, we didn't have to audition), and the cast spends the better part of every weekend until December at the studio. She uses the older girls to teach and help organize the younger ones, and the whole thing takes eighty-four hours.

For many, The Nutcracker is a family affair. But the Fokine Nutcracker adds new meaning to that adage: Fokine's two daughters run their own Nutcrackers, cut from the same cloth as hers, and since their production dates are staggered, they are able to share resources and guest artists.

Nina Marlow of the Nina Marlow School of Ballet in Phoenix, Arizona, started her Nutcracker seventeen years ago. And Donna Decker of the Donna Decker School of Ballet, with studios in Norwich and Oneonta in upstate New York, has been producing hers for fourteen years. Nina danced the Snow Queen and "Waltz of the Flowers" lead in her mother's production; Donna, in her own words, was "a Polichinelle forever" but also danced Chinese and Mirliton.

Decker said, "I respect my mother's Nutcracker too much to change anything. Her first act is the best I've ever seen. The story just comes across." She enjoys their exchange on a practical level too. "Mom uses my Mother Ginger costume every year, and I borrow her men's costumes for Spanish and Arabian."