FEATURE
Dancers: Aisha Callahan and Alicia Deleganes.
Dancer: Eliot Wallace. All photos by
the shape and spacing of the ensemble, there emphasizing the emotion behind a gesture or facial expression.
Blaine Truitt Covert.
GROWING UP with THE NUTCRACKER With children at its heart, George Balanchine's version of the holiday classic serves as ballet's learning ladder. BY MARTY HUGHLEY.
ON A RAINY SATURDAY AFTERNOON,
a dozen or so children, dressed in T-shirts and hoodies, track pants or tights, in pointe shoes or bare feet, sit on a gray-carpeted floor at Oregon Ballet Theatre, chatting idly, a few of them casually stretching. Promptly, at the top of the hour, they file into a mirror-and-glass-lined studio to rehearse for what is, to many of them, the highlight of their year: George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker. Through the windows outside, the backdrop is distinctly autumnal, with tufts of rustand-yellow leaves hanging above the
P8 OREGON BALLET THEATRE THE NUTCRACKER
street. But with their winter showcase fast approaching, these pre-teen dancers are focused, at once businesslike and enthusiastic. “We’re going to go from the hobby horse and the tug-of-war and on to the place where we stopped last time,” announces Children’s Coach Gavin Larsen, a former OBT Principal dancer who’s barely bigger than her young charges. With Olivia Pyne, from the School of Oregon Ballet Theatre faculty, standing in as the mysterious old man Drosselmeier, Larsen directs them through the party scene near the start of the ballet—here adjusting
“OK,” Larsen says after more than an hour’s steady work. “We’re going to take a twominute water break, then come back and start again from the beginning.” This is, in a sense, the heart of Balanchine’s Nutcracker, the key to its unparalleled popularity and importance in American ballet. Since the original 1892 staging by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, numerous choreographers have revisited the magical Tchaikovsky score and the story adapted from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. But, as Robert Greskovic noted in his history/guide book Ballet 101, Balanchine “honored a premise of the original concept that is frequently abandoned, namely the use of children themselves in the roles conceived as child characters.” Along with Balanchine’s visually sumptuous choreography, the approach has helped make this version the foundation of American ballet audience building and dancer education. “There are a lot of classical ballets that incorporate children, says OBT School Director Anthony Jones. “But there’s no other ballet where children play such an integral role, where if you took them out, the story wouldn’t work the same way.” Jones recalls his own early experience with The Nutcracker at Minnesota Dance Theatre. “I was nine, and it was my first time on stage dancing. I was a mouse. It was really exciting, but already I wanted to move up. That was the biggest part of my year then: I couldn’t wait for summer to be over so I