The Nutz: versions new and old arrive with the holidays plus a feast of faux pas

Dance Magazine, Dec, 2004

CRACKING NUTS WILL BE MORE OF AN ADVENTURE THAN USUAL THIS YEAR. Two LEADING STATESIDE COMPANIES, THE SAN FRANCISCO BALLET AND THE WASHINGTON BALLET, WILL UNVEIL NEW PRODUCTIONS THAT BLEND THE SEASONAL FABLE WITH THE HISTORY OF THE COMMUNITIES THEY SERVE. THE U. S. ALSO GETS ITS FIRST LOOK AT THE BRILLIANT, UNORTHODOX MATTHEW BOURNE STAGING THAT HAS BECOME A HOLIDAY STAPLE IN THE UNITED KINGDOM. WE HAVE SUGGESTIONS, TOO, FOR SAVORING NUTCRACKER FUN AT HOME. AND IN CASE YOU CAN SPARE A MOMENT TO LAUGH DURING THESE FRAZZLING WEEKS, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR CHERYL OSSOLA HAS COOKED UP A TASTY BATCH OF NUTCRACKER MISHAPS THAT ARE MORE FUN TO READ ABOUT THAN TO EXPERIENCE. JEST IN TIME, TOO.--ALLAN ULRICH

Nutcracker! BOURNE AGAIN

BY ALASTAIR MACAULAY

For some choreographers, staging The Nutcracker is one of their big ambitions. For Matthew Bourne, however, it came as a complete surprise. It was 1992. He'd only been a professional choreographer for five years; he was in his early thirties; his company, Adventures in Motion Pictures as it was then called, had just six dancers, one of them himself. But 1992 was the centenary of the St. Petersburg premiere of Tchaikovsky's double bill of the ballet, The Nutcracker, and the opera, Yolanta, and the enterprising Opera North had the bright idea of reprising both pieces in new-look productions. The director Martin Duncan, already a fan of some of Bourne's earlier work, invited him to make the ballet.

The Nutcracker! that Bourne invented with Duncan (whose name remains on the credits, although Bourne has made changes since then) bears many of the hallmarks of the work that Bourne has been staging ever since. There's less of E. T. A. Hoffmann's original story than in almost any other version, and numerous new characters (Bourne expanded the size of his company from six to eighteen, and stopped dancing himself). Loads of suspense, too. No choreographer can have ever held his central Nutcracker narrative in doubt for longer. Only as the final curtain is about to come down do we see--at last!--how the story is going to wind up, and who'll end up with whom.

It has its share of darkness. This is a Nutcracker with plenty of heart--and indeed heartbreak, sometimes at moments when nobody, except perhaps Tchaikovsky himself, has had heartbreak in mind. Yet what impresses most here is not cloud but silver lining: It's bright, naughty, and (despite 20th-century costumes) oddly Dickensian. Most Nutcrackers start in the family home, yet Bourne makes it a story about familylessness--about children in an orphanage, like a modern-dress version of the one in Oliver Twist. And if you know the wonderfully horrid Squeers family in Nicholas Nickleby (before he took up dancing, Bourne loved the classic 1980-81 Royal Shakespeare Company staging), you may recognize traces of them in the creeps who run Bourne's Nutcracker orphanage, Dr. and Mrs. Dross with their monster children Fritz and Sugar. As in Dickens, these are gorgons you love to hate: You laugh at how they appall you.

Bourne approached his story with the theater sense that marks all his work. What's the story? How do we keep the plot going? What's the music saying, and to what extent do we go with and/or against it? Bourne's story is all about giving these orphans the ideas that underlie the idea of Christmas--winter sports, sweets, magic, travel, family, love. The ballet's snow scene becomes a skating party (respired By Sonja Henie movies), its kingdom of sweets becomes a funny but sickly-sweet Busby Berkeley Sweetieland of false values, and the whole tension of the show has to do with the feelings of orphaned children who, especially at Christmastime, are outsiders looking in.

Bourne's 1992 Clara, Etta Murfitt, is still dancing the role. She can still look childlike, although she's now a mother herself and is also one of the company's rehearsal directors. "As soon as I saw Matthew's work for Adventures in Motion Pictures in the 1980s, I thought 'That's what I want to do'. It was funny and clever, and it always gives the audience a good time. Then, when I joined the company, I found the whole creative process exciting: We contribute, and we're included in everything. And when we re-rehearse it today, we're always looking for ways in which to connect the music and the story yet better."

I have known Bourne since 1982. He was 22, just starting a BA in dance theatre at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance in London; I was 27, teaching dance history there. I saw his student choreography, and knew then that he was the outstanding talent of a gifted crop of students. In the late 1990s, he asked me to collaborate with him on a book of interviews about his work, and I became fascinated by how many questions I could ask, and how undefensive the answers were.

Today, he is the most prestigious choreographer in Britain, and there are times when his productions can be seen simultaneously in three different London theaters. His company is now called New Adventures, but it's his name that is used to stamp his productions (Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker! and Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake is how these productions are sold all over Britain). And there are dancers in New Adventures who only took up dancing because they fell in love with his work when they were children. Yet it's astonishing how much he is still like the 22-year-old who was doing his first ballet lessons when I first knew him: relaxed, unspoiled, cheerful.