Feeding - importance of images of food in 'Hansel and Gretel' and 'The Nutcracker' - Editorial

Dance Magazine, March, 1997 by Richard Philp

After a delicious excess of holiday entertainments (this column is being written in early January), I was sensitized to just how central the images of food and feeding are to art. Ten days after Christmas. I attended the Metropolitan Opera's old production of Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel with strong new choreography by the Australian-born dancer-choreographer John Meehan. While Hansel is not an essential economic ingredient in the opera world in the same way that The Nutcracker is in dance, there are parallels here worth exploring while memory is fresh.

Both works are associated with Christmas, but in the case of Hansel there is no reference to Christmas or its traditions. Of course, the glorious pantomime at the end of Hansel's first act features the famous fourteen angels in costumes like those polymer baroque-style tree ornaments found in bins at Bloomingdale's. (In fact, there are actually twenty angels in this production--including the four male aerialists in billowing dresses who fly down on wires from the grids above, all to stunning effect--and you can bet that everybody's counting to make sure there are no more than fourteen onstage at any one time!) Both opera and ballet were premiered at Christmas (Nutcracker in 1892, Hansel the very next year); both are about children who enter worlds of fantasy and danger.

But there is more: Both draw their real power--that elemental power that transforms these fairy stories into compelling theater--from an obsession with food. It is desperately absent in the opera and overabundant in the ballet. Although starvation is not as severe a threat in northern European countries today as it once was, the memory still evokes a primitive response. In the first act Hansel and his sister, Gretel, are discovered entering the hallucinatory stages of food deprivation. All their thoughts, songs, and even dances are about food. The quest for food drives them into the woods, where they become lost and are guarded overnight by those angels. As if to punch up the danger of the children's situation, Meehan has choreographed sharply focused, determined movements and gestures conveying the idea that these are very professional, edgy angels, angels of the 1990s, angels with a conscience who take life-and-death matters seriously. When the children, still alive, awake at dawn, they discover a food fantasy, an edible house owned by a witch who cooks and eats children--children who, at the opera's end, cook and eat her. Cannibalism is not new to so-called children's stories, nor is it unknown to starving humans in need of protein. But at the opera's end, when the feeding crisis is over, reality is restored and everybody takes to dancing.

Zachary Solov's choreography for the Met served well for almost thirty years, but Meehan's fresh interpretation of dance opportunities integrates plot and movement into a story that can still be--like its cousin Nutcracker--very frightening, to adults as well as children.

A scheduling accident resulted in my seeing three Nutcruckers in one week just before the feast of Christmas. The venerable New York City Ballet production was first Then Donald Byrd's The Harlem Nutcracker at BAM, in which Clara, traditionally a little girl, is now a well-to-do grandmother with a Harlem brownstone whose body is found dead beside the Christmas tree by her grandchildren as she ascends heavenward with her deceased husband in an apotheosis that would have certainly grabbed the attention of the original choreographer and composer (this production used Duke Ellington's jazz version). And then Francis Patrelle's chamber version, Yorkville Nutcracker, which makes clever use of a small cast on a small stage to great effect.

Nutcracker's opening scenes celebrate solid values of hearth and home, soon to be cast aside for a loopy fight with maurading rodents (searching for food), and ending up in a "kingdom" of the richest imaginable edibles--bad for teeth and stomach but great for the imagination, particularly if you have a 6:30 curtain and haven't had dinner. It's all snacks and desserts, a gastronomic nightmare quite incapable of sustaining life for long--a metaphor, in fact, for the way some people still regard funding for the arts.

Holiday entertainments aside, nutritional realities are a matter of life and death, onstage as well as off. The recent release of the first round of the NEA's drastically reduced grants to arts organizations is a sad statement on feeding this vital ingredient of American culture. (See story page 32.) Now all our artists nationwide have been put on starvation notice--at the direction of congressional conservatives who have cut the NEA's budget by 40 percent and still talk about closing this nurturing agency down by 1998--against the overwhelming wishes of their constituents.

Who is affected by these congressional cutbacks? All of us. One NEA dollar generates ten more dollars in the private sector. Those artists who lost NEA money this year are sending the rejection letters to their congressmen to show them that they have avenged themselves not on "Washington" but on people in their own home districts.