Now that Thanksgiving is over and tacky ornaments adorn Wal-marts across the land, the time has come to commence the holiday festivities.
Apart from swilling eggnog and decorating a tree, one of the most popular ways to celebrate the season is by attending a performance of The Nutcracker. Seeing children, mouths agape, watching the antics of dancing sugar plums and gingerbread men can turn even the Scroogiest of men merry.
For many families, especially those with young dancers, The Nutcracker is more than just another Tchaikovsky ballet (see Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty). It's also a family tradition. Most ballet dancers begin their training at the age of eight, and many of the roles in The Nutcracker-which is, after all, the story of a little girl's dream-are written for young children.
Carolina Ballet auditions children in late September for roles as gingerbread men, mice, partygoers and of course, Clara. Triangle Youth Ballet, located in Chapel Hill, rehearses once a week until November and then twice a week until the performances. Both companies end with multiple weekends of performances during the months of November and December, which is called "Nutcracker Season" in many ballet circles.
If it sounds tiring, that's because it is. Many companies have two performances a day on the weekends. Even the professional dancers at Carolina Ballet take time off during the week between performances to avoid exhaustion.
But they see it as a tradition too.
"All of the 32 dancers in the Carolina Ballet have danced the piece before, with studios while they were growing up, with the company or while on tour," said Elizabeth Parker, assistant to director Robert Weiss.
The Nutcracker Suite, which was composed from 1891 to 1892 and later choreographed by Marius Petipa, is based on the book The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by E.T.A. Hoffman.
In the ballet, a little girl named Clara is given a nutcracker by her magic uncle Drosselmeyer that comes alive to defend her from a legion of evil mice and their mouse king. The nutcracker then whisks her off to a magic land of sweets where the sugar plum fairy-who, for the uninitiated, is the lead part in the ballet-presents Clara with dances from all different types of sweets. The sweets hail from different lands, including Spain, Arabia, China and Russia, and they perform dances based on the style and music of their various homes.
Without question, the climax of the ballet is the spectacular pas de deux of the Sugar Plum fairy and her cavalier that ends Clara's magical dream.
Although the gist of the nutcracker is always the same, each company choreographs its own version that they perform year after year, Parker said.
Carolina Ballet's features real snow at the end of the first act and a Christmas tree that extends to 26 feet during the fight with the mouse king. Their mesmerizing Arabian solo begins and ends in a real giant coffee cup. The Triangle Youth Ballet, on the other hand, uses a tea pot for their Chinese dance and brings the Arabian dancers in on a litter.
From the proud grandpa to the little girl who fell asleep during the tea duet in the balcony during Sunday's performance by Carolina Ballet, ballet-goers delight in the ease with which these hardworking dancers seem to float across the stage. Bring a little girl to the performance, however, and you may be in for a lifetime of ballet lessons.
"The kids on stage are having the time of their life," said Lauren Lorentz de Haas, artistic director of Triangle Youth Ballet. "They love this production. But they just love to perform."
Carolina Ballet will perform The Nutcracker Dec. 15-23 at Progress Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh Memorial Auditorium, 2 E. South St. in Raleigh. See www.carolinaballet.com for show times. Triangle Youth Ballet will perform The Nutcracker Dec. 9 at 7 p.m. and Dec. 10 at 1 and 4 p.m. at the Carolina Theater, 309 W. Morgan St. in Durham.
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