Ballet West: The Nutcracker

The Nutcracker is as much of a holiday tradition as streaming White Christmas on Netflix. We depend on it as a marker of the season, a reason to call up favorite friends and family for a jolly holiday date. We revel in the familiarity of the story, the staging, the characters. We know what is coming next and wait with bated breath for our favorite solos. We compare this year’s show to last year’s show, or to the time when we were in it. We pick out something special to wear to the Capitol Theatre.

This is the 75th-anniversary year of Willam Christensen’s The Nutcracker. As with anything where familiarity has come to the forefront (hello, long-term relationships!), there is the danger of taking it for granted. In knowing it by heart, we don’t have to listen to the story carefully, or mine for the nuance beneath the surface. In short, we don’t really look at what’s in front of us.

It lies, then, in the performers to shock us awake. This past Saturday, at Ballet West’s The Nutcracker, I found myself longing for that soon into the first act.

Christensen’s Nutcracker, the longest-running version of the production worldwide, is heavily influenced by vaudeville, and incorporates a certain amount of shtick and comedy.  As a program note by Ballet West artistic director Adam Sklute described, this was one of the stylistic choices Christensen employed in making a “uniquely American” Nutcracker. But at times, a focus on entertaining bleeds into parody of characters, where there may otherwise be room to root them in reality.

I wondered, even while staying true to Christensen, if there was still room for a deeper sense of storytelling? A more committed research of character? An approach to a beloved performance focused not on delivering familiar high points, but on approaching the original source material with true curiosity?

And then I got my answer.

When Emily Neale took the stage for the Arabian dance, she shook me awake. Through every languid extension and elastic suspension, she exuded seductive, exotic energy. Her gaze confident and a bit playful, she fully embodied, rather than just portrayed, the role. Together with partner Dominic Ballard, she renewed the infamous duet. I felt like I’d never seen it before. It felt gutsy and alive.

I became immediately aware that this difference was a crucial factor in my experience, as I noticed it in other places. The moments in which dancers risked taking a role dead-seriously, theatrically diving in head first, popped out like bolded font. As the Nutcracker Prince, Kyle Davis brought such grounded and calm energy that, in the brief moment he took to the center, the audience went quiet. Hadriel Diniz, Amber Miller, and Gabrielle Salvatto let the rhythm of the Spanish dance flavor their every step, bringing with each leap and turn the full emotion of a foreign land. In committing like this, they honored their characters.

I know, I’m not mentioning the obvious technical prowess inherent in pulling off a flawless Nutcracker, but when we are in a long-term relationship, it just takes more to get us flushed. This show has stood the test of time as communities across the country refuse to live without it. The gorgeous trappings of sparkly colorful costumes, whimsical sets, and promising young talent cannot help but bring Christmas cheer. But what’s underneath is also for the taking.

There is a chance to reconnect with The Nutcracker on a deeper, more meaningful level. It lies in the performers giving the ballet’s characters their due emotional weight. It’s in the subtle moments of pantomime at the party, in the delicacy of the Snow Queen, in Drosselmeyer believing he can conjure magic. It cannot be layered on top of choreography but instead has to inform it from its roots. This ballet is dance theater, after all - the storytelling is as paramount as the pirouettes. 

Ballet West’s The Nutcracker continues through Thursday, December 26, at the Janet Quinney Lawson Capitol Theatre. 

Emeri Fetzer is a dancer and communications specialist. She works at the University of Utah, performs with Phantom Limb Company, and is looking forward to developing new choreography in the coming year. 

Dan Higgins: Speak

Dan Higgins’ new work Speak, which opened yesterday at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, looks like it might have been made for his employer, Repertory Dance Theatre (it was sponsored by RDT, as part of the company’s Link Series for independent choreographers). The seventy-minute dance, in its finer moments, brought to mind teenage memories of seeing that company. There was a pleasure in watching the eight dancers — four women and four men — swim through the project of being together on stage for more than an hour. 

At the outset, we heard a disembodied Higgins reminding us to silence our phones. Then he enjoined us to look over our left shoulder, to take stock of what we smelled, to revisit a recent significant decision we’ve taken in our own lives. Soon we were watching six black benches being rearranged on white marley floor. Eight dancers folded and unfolded, glided and slowly toppled, were careful and precise in the harmonics where they faced, how they followed a looping initiation from elbow to knee to fingertips, in and out of unison.

There was a spareness and a wakefulness in this first scene that I didn’t expect. The air was cut by a leggy, bouncy solo from Emma Eileen Hansen. A frontal assault of technical prowess changed hands a few times and eventually gave way to a tactical confrontation between the men and the women — a study in changing focus and walking on the beat. The benches lined up like chess pieces.

The lithe Mar Undag and Jaclyn Brown disappeared smoothly behind these black slats of wood — moments like this returned to the spirit of the first five minutes. Higgins sometimes got lost. He sometimes relied too heavily on the kind of music that stands in the background and tells you vaguely how to feel without saying much else. But he made a believable seventy-minute dance. There were no big questions, but I respected getting to see these eight talented dancers coexisting and, at times, rising to the occasion of play. 

Speak was at its best when it didn’t know where it was going. One section comes to mind where the conceit of a common struggle gave way to chaos. A meandering trumpet (the music for the piece was by Michael Wall) whirled through the air under a series of harried runs across the stage — six-second character studies from Brendan Rupp, Micah Burkhardt, Bailey Sill, Jonathan Kim, and Morgan Phillips. 

Higgins knows how to use stillness to effect. Sometimes, I wish he would lean into that more than other implements of the scholastic modern-dance toolbox. The ending: Higgins himself came out and picked up where his opening speech left off, recounting a vague fable about a boy bravely jumping over an infinite void. This was a little much, but I can forgive him. The fleet-footed romping of his cast was enough. 

Speak by Dan Higgins. Photo by Sharon Kain.

Samuel Hanson is the editor and executive director of loveDANCEmore. 

The Penguin Lady, joBdance & LAJAMARTIN in SPHERE: Phase One

SPHERE: Phase One brought together three distinct choreographers in a shared evening in the Leona Wagner Black Box Theatre, presented by The Penguin Lady. Unique in their voices and visions, Natosha Washington, LAJAMARTIN (Laja Field and Martin Durov), and Joseph “jo” Blake shared themes of identity, resistance, and empowerment. 

In an excerpt of “Pinot Noir,” Laja Field and Martin Durov (LAJAMARTIN) invited us into a day in their lives, in both mundane moments rooted in reality and the fantastical musings of a dream-state. Truly dance-theater in style, “Pinot Noir” transitioned between twisted floorwork and elastic partnering to grounded pedestrian action without hesitation - one moment suspended in an elegant balance, the next casually propped in an everyday stance. Both ways of being (the trained mover and the human) existed in equality, and neither had hierarchy onstage. Fleeting scenes, from lip-syncing lines of “Cat On a Hot Tin Roof,” to a hip-swaying, skirt-whipping quick step, to catching a flopping Field on a fishing pole, painted a holistic story of a couple. They were not clichéd, but relatable in their whimsy. None of us is a cohesive sentence; we are all a mess of dreams and fantasies.

The twelve dancers of Weber State University’s Moving Company paid tribute to the female voice in their excerpt of “Take Us As We Are,” a continually evolving work, much like its subject matter. Choreographer Joseph “jo” Blake reiterated in a program note that the choreography remains responsive to the discussions it catalyzes.

Clad in long, flowing fabrics in watercolor shades, the dancers surrounded a long table, fixed in shifting tableaus. Soon, they began to work together to break down the structure of the table into thirds, laying it flat, clearing the center of the stage. The work was not without tension - at times they moved in synergy, at times with resistance. Voices of iconic women echoed through the theater: Michelle Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Yursa Amjad, Emma Watson.

Soon they enveloped a single dancer with her back against a wall (in this case, one table’s top). They evoked memories, both personal and historical, of female fortitude against diversity. Solo moments, with the community never far away, each reminded us that even when an individual seems to stand alone, an army is behind them. As the table barriers cleared, they danced with exuberance and freedom. Finally, the group climbed over a last wall toward the audience, their faces open and resolute.

We had the opportunity to see Blake’s choreography course through his own body in “only he might know?” - a solo that grappled with identity expression. His back exposed to the audience, Blake rippled his shoulder blades, the beginnings of phrases percolating through his spine. As these motions sometimes stopped at his neck, sometimes escaped through his fingertips, it felt as if something was gradually working its way to surface. With staccato movement, he brought himself to his feet, then shifted back to the bench where he began. The action was both sinewy and sharp, fluid and broken.

The music stopped to reveal Blake’s breathing, another exposure. His space was one of quiet vulnerability even in its voyeurism.

In The Penguin Lady’s “Pluck,” a band of women gripped apples. Shuddering, vibrating, they seemed inseparable from the force that the object had over them. Their faces suggested something beyond fascination. Something more menacing. Corinne Penka, dressed in apple-red silk, whipped and darted in all directions, diligently following the apple in her hand.

Apples immediately connote original sin, the story of Eve tempted in the garden. There was certainly something tempting in this reference, particularly when paired with this all-female collective. But as the dancers furiously explored a changing relationship to their apples, spanning from obsession to repulsion, other associations arose. At one moment, Penka gathered armfuls of abandoned apples. Trying to protect them, the group restrained her with long red cords, her limbs stretched in opposite directions.

In both scenarios, she was controlled by an outside source. It was only when both apples and restraints were shed that the dancers gained liberty, moving in nurturing pairs. We are so often bound by our personal narratives, yet lost when we shed the things we believe encompass our identities. The dancers went back to the apples, this time with reverence. They took a bite.

The common threads running through SPHERE: Phase One are perhaps the natural workings of a viewer’s mind forging connections. But in a dance community this tight-knit, this inherently supportive, it cannot be all coincidence. As artists, our work influences, inspires, and catalyzes our circle. On to phase two. 

SPHERE: Phase One continues through tonight, Saturday, December 7, at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center.

Emeri Fetzer is a dancer and communications specialist. She works at the University of Utah and performs with Phantom Limb Company, and is looking forward to developing new choreography in the coming year.

Repertory Dance Theatre: Sounds Familiar

Repertory Dance Theatre’s Sounds Familiar began in a manner that was also familiar, the director striding through the closed curtain to deliver pre-show remarks. Immediately, though, this familiarity was playfully subverted. Artistic and executive director Linda C. Smith executed a perfect act of vaudeville opposite an airborne pest, through attempts to shoo, entice, capture, and eventually menace it with a baseball bat, to Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee.” It was on the nose, tongue in cheek, surprising, and, yes, brief enough to be both compact and impactful. The program continued in this fashion. 

A diverse dozen of local artists was called upon to choreograph short works to culturally prominent pieces of classical music. This seemingly simple premise was likely tricky to produce, involving a great deal of structure to support many discrete works, a conceptual scaffolding to hold them together, and a good deal of trust and investment in many artists to pull it off - which RDT did, and beautifully so. 

Each musical selection was one deeply embedded in current culture. When called on to consider such a selection explicitly, it is often to the tune of asserting value or declaiming knowledge. Sounds Familiar is a title that perfectly encapsulates this production’s opposite approach. Video interludes presented history and context, serving as transitions while dancers and stage were reset. With the benefit of educational content, and without judgment, the audience’s tacit recognition of a classical song could become the patent processing of new, affecting interpretations. This complex pairing of familiar and unexpected must have been challenging to produce on the front end. However, it was perfectly simple and rewarding to appreciate. 

Three reprising solos by Molly Heller, duets by Nicholas Cendese, Natosha Washington, and Luc Vanier, and a solo by Sharee Lane danced by Ursula Perry were instantly memorable. 

Heller’s pieces effectively utilized repetition and escalation on many levels. The solos were interspersed throughout the program, grounding what was otherwise successive and fast-paced. Each solo was set to the same Bach prelude (from Cello Suite No. 1). Each dancer occupied the same space while moving through graspable patterns of repetition into escalations of phrasing that then moved beyond our ability to track. Dancers Trung “Daniel” Do, Jaclyn Brown, and Jonathan Kim each inhabited this echoed approach wholly differently. The reflection of the internal structure of the music with its repeated themes and variations, and the play on the very notion of a prelude, was motivated and moving. I could watch an infinite iteration of dancers traversing that diagonal, to that suite, under Heller’s direction and never, ever tire of it.

Nicholas Cendese’s piece for Do and Kim, set to Beethoven’s “Für Elise,” was spare in staging and totally full in aesthetic sensibility. The two duetted with gorgeous synchronicity, established some iconic movements, and then used them as landmarks of recognition for departure into fiercely individual contemporary movement. The integration of contemporary social dance wasn’t imitative or exploitative. It was seamless and completely culturally legible and authentic, in flawless contrast to the music’s deeply imprinted piano rondo. I hope I forever associate those arpeggiated alternating motifs in A minor with these two incredible performers. It was like viewing a film in which you let yourself sit back, suspend disbelief, and simply enjoy the craft, and then leave the theater suspecting that you might’ve just enjoyed a piece of incisive social criticism.

Duets by Natosha Washington and Luc Vanier were each richer in staging and setting. Washington’s featured a tableau of archetypes: a statuesque woman in an impossibly long gown, obscuring a pedestal, with a man below; a bouquet of flowers; a chalk circle; and the darkly shining instrument of pianist Ricklen Nobis. Vanier’s set was Washington’s dystopian mirror, or foil: dancers enrobed in hazmat ponchos, trashed couches and a glitching television on squeaky casters, cyclorama projections of desolate environments, and a faint tinny musical recording. Both pieces explicitly treated challenging topics. Washington’s duet brought immediate gravity to the inherent romance of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” Dancers Ursula Perry and Tyler Orcutt exhibited a mastery of contained fluidity that established the weight of connection, and their artistic maturity allowed it to arrive safely and responsibly at a depiction of intimate partner violence. Every choice, from the initial selection of the music and its live execution, to the stage dressing and perfect casting, supported the presentation of something darkly beautiful and deeply considered. 

Vanier’s duet was equally human and thoughtful in its treatment of ecological disaster. It built slowly and never hurried, allowing for the changeable pacing of the video background. Lauren Curley and Dan Higgins have the incredible ability to project their awareness at each other with their attention drawn in opposite directions, past each other, or into the middle distance, which made every act of intricate partnering or the intimate brushing back of a plastic hood intensely chilling. The dramatic physical scale of the projection and the indistinct symphonic strains of Beethoven framed the human drama, creating with the set and costuming a built world evoking Ray Bradbury or Ursula K. LeGuin’s science and speculative fiction.

Ursula Perry’s solo, choreographed by Sharee Lane, was a virtuoso accomplishment. Not for a moment did the Puccini aria overshadow Perry’s movement. It done was in my favorite kind of contemporary ballet vernacular, and felt connected to the very core of its performer. It is good to be reminded that the complementary acts of reaching out and digging down haven’t been mined to nothing yet. There was an untellable richness and feeling to Perry’s performance. A marriage of the universal and the personal is itself a classical artistic aspiration, and it was wonderful to see it carried out by these experienced, capable artists.

There were some very successful ensemble pieces in the program as well. Sara Pickett and Nathan Shaw showed impressive command of formations, the former most notably in passing lines and the latter in the transmutations of unison trios. Nancy Carter’s piece was well-rehearsed and intricate, fully exploring range and levels through the modality of bungee. It was quite stylistically cohesive, such that the inclusion of different instrumentations of the same Bach fugue was a confusing choice. Elle Johansen seemed especially confident and at ease dancing tethered to an aerial rig. 

Sounds Familiar achieved a sense of history, diverse voice, and community presence, all of which I am grateful to have witnessed. In so doing, it also showcased the incredible caliber of its company, which performed 15 discrete works with tireless commitment. The show was a success belonging to many, certainly not least these eight strong dancers.

Nora Price is a Milwaukee native living and working in Salt Lake City. She can be seen performing with Durian Durian, an art band that combines post-punk music and contemporary dance.

Onstage Ogden: Dance Theatre of Harlem

This year marks Dance Theatre of Harlem’s fiftieth anniversary. The company was founded by the inimitable New York City Ballet principal dancer Arthur Mitchell alongside ballet teacher Karel Shook at the height of the civil rights movement, in 1969, shortly after the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Mitchell cultivated his own dream of creating a platform for Black ballet dancers in the New York neighborhood of Harlem. That dream is still alive today, as seen in the affirming presence of a large company of people of color both excelling at and innovating within the Eurocentric art form of ballet, under the direction of those with a shared experience. This is not a white-run company that merely represents diversity in the form of a token person of color; Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH) is both embodied and directed by a majority of people that may see themselves in each other. 

This performance reflected upon the company’s 50-year lifespan to date, and additionally memorialized the life of Arthur Mitchell, who passed away last September at the age of 84. The bereft dancers did not appear to let the passing of their fearless leader dim their dancing; rather, they performed innovative choreography with sincere confidence and beauty. 

Nothing compares to dancing in the processing of grief. I write this with the utmost respect for pillars of dance who have passed: I would rejoice (albeit with sadness) to experience only performances by those paying homage to the deceased for the rest of my life. It is so humbling to witness the transformation of complicated feelings into movement. In a way, I suppose most dances could be viewed through the lens of “The Body Keeps the Score”; the way in which bodies can remember teachers and ancestors whose bodies made and influenced them in a continuum of memory stored in bones. 

It was an honor and a pleasure to see DTH in Ogden, Utah, of all places. The show began with the most classical piece of the night, Orange, which featured costumes and lighting to match, and was choreographed by Stanton Welch, the Australian artistic director of Houston Ballet. Although the piece was very traditional, there were delightfully unexpected outgrowths, such as the swift wobbling of heads while dancers bourréed across the stage. Here, their heads, normally instructed to “float above the body” as if nothing was happening down below, mirrored the movement of the feet, that carried on in a more classical way. This combination seemed to caricaturize the very act of ballet, as if the dancers were really bobble-head ballerinas. The bobble-headedness, however, was filled out by intricate duets, including a kiss on the cheek from a male to a female dancer that yet again made me think that the piece was playfully highlighting tropes of ballet through the abstract premise of the color orange. 

The second piece, Change, channeled the past with the dancers - Lindsey Donnell, Daphne Lee, and Ingrid Silva -  “clothed in the legacy of their predecessors,” wearing leotards constructed as “a creative patchwork of tights worn by former dancers with Dance Theatre of Harlem.” The past was also channeled through the labyrinthine choreography by Dianne McIntyre, who was “inspired by women - Black, brown, and beige - who have refashioned the neighborhood, the country, the world, through their vision, courage, and endurance,” whom she calls “warriors for change.” The dancers moved beautifully together, running in place, dangling their arms out as if their bodies were crucified, crouching down and mapping out points on the ground, and dancing with grace through it all. Each dancer performed a solo with movement that was sometimes shared by the piece at large. The choreography featured a variety of styles, that were not just thrown in for the sake of contemporizing ballet; the styles referenced the women that the movement was inspired by with a depth of character and understanding. This piece had the reverence and gravity of a grand finale, which it could have been. 

This Bitter Earth was performed by Crystal Serrano and Choong Hoon Lee and featured a poignant mashup of Max Richter’s minimalist composition “On the Nature of Daylight” and Dinah Washington’s soulful rendition of the titular song. Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon‘s robotic duet read impressively, as though the dancers were actually programmed to dance together and with no one else. It was romantic in a sleek and silvery way. Lee often ducked under Serrano’s outstretched arm or leg, even mid-rond de jambe. It was only at the very end that the dancers crumpled into each other’s arms while Lee carried Serrano offstage, swiftly, before too much of their human nature was glimpsed. 

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa choreographed the grand finale, Balamouk, that truly was grand, if not a bit disjointed stylistically as well as compositionally. The large cast of eleven dancers magnified gestural movement, crossing arms over chests and flicking hands out to the side, jumping up and out in close proximity; I could have watched this tight grouping of people do these moves indefinitely. However, the dance proceeded to expand outward from the tight clump and oscillated from upbeat music and choreography to ominous music with dancing done amidst fog, then back to dancing exuberantly; then to a multi-minute sequence featuring one woman being lifted and pointing her finger out in front of her, that sequence culminating in a male dancer being pointed at by three female dancers. I was not sure what to make of this dance other than the stress I associate with “call-out culture,” as it went from a convivial tone in a group to a more accusatory mode of incisive, yet haphazard, pointing fingers. 

Each duet throughout the performance was juxtaposed in my mind with the famous pas de deux from George Balanchine’s Agon, which Arthur Mitchell famously performed with Diana Adams in 1957. The intensity of that duet, featuring a Black man and a white woman, was not unnoticed during a time when white supremacy was often enacted in the form of lynching and other more “grassroots” atrocities fueled by Jim Crow policies. I compare this past brutality to a slightly different yet still institutionalized form of white supremacy that exists today, where Jim Crow policies may be flagrantly masked as a war on drugs or terrorism or “cleaning up the streets,” and “grassroots” white supremacists are just as violent as those in the past, further emboldened by White House leadership. 

Mitchell stated that Agon was an exploration of “my skin color against hers,” and I would wager that it was also an act of extreme bravery on Mitchell’s part. The duet was performed just two years after Emmett Till was brutally murdered for having a forgettable interaction with a white woman, which was spun as a violation of how Black men were “supposed to” interact with white women. At the time, this kind of tragedy was not uncommon; parallels must also be drawn to how justice plays out, or doesn’t, today. 

It seems like it could be both culturally and personally healing for the dancers of DTH to perform duets as themselves, or as living beings, in addition to being representations of Black and white people in conflict. There is more to existence than that conflict, though, and these dancers seem to celebrate that fact in their practice. In his time, Arthur Mitchell was both the first African-American dancer in a major ballet company (New York City Ballet) as well as the first African-American principal dancer. His work, that not only made room for people of color in ballet but vindicated and innovated the art form, is continued by the current artists of Dance Theatre of Harlem. The company will continue to carry on, and will change, just as this program’s piece by that name did so powerfully. 

Emmett Wilson/Ew, the dancer is a body-based artist from Houston. They live in Salt Lake City, doing strange acts at drag shows, making and teaching dance for a variety of contexts, and working as a community garden coordinator. Their practice hinges upon vulnerability and resource-sharing to offer care and support to sustain community.