Christmas ‘Cracker

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This article was published 17/12/2009 (5974 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With its towering Christmas tree, whirling tutu-clad snowflakes and enchanting Tchaikovsky score, Nutcracker is guaranteed to put even a Grinch into the holiday spirit.

But the greater magic of the perennial ballet — opening Saturday for a seven-performance run at the Centennial Concert Hall — may be the connections it sparks between generations, both in the audience and in the cast.

With two of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s top female dancers easing back from maternity leave this year (look for new mom Tara Birtwhistle in the character role of the grandmother), four up-and-coming dancers, as well as principal Vanessa Lawson, are rotating in the starring role of Clara.

She’s the girl who receives a soldier-style nutcracker at a Christmas party, dreams of a fantasy adventure, and wakes up back at home on Christmas morning.

Second soloist Jo-Ann Sundermeier got to play Clara at the last of six performances in Cleveland, where the RWB has just toured Nutcracker for the first time.

Sundermeier, 26, recalls a moment she shared in the wings with a Cleveland boy who was probably about 10, playing one of the party guests.

"Just before the bows, I came offstage… and one of the little kids said, ‘Um, Clara?’ I turned and I was like, ‘Yeah?’ He said (in a shy little voice): ‘You did a really good job today.’

"That was so sweet — just the cutest thing ever. That’s sort of the reason why Nutcracker is what it is."

Sundermeier, who grew up in Florida and is in her sixth season with the RWB, made her own debut at about age seven as a bon-bon in a Fort Lauderdale Nutcracker.

She’s been striving to rekindle her childhood sense of wonder, innocence and excitement because of a key change in the RWB’s Nutcracker this year. Clara used to be played by a child dancer in the party and mouse-battle scenes, then "transform" into the adult Clara of her imagination for the snow pas de deux and climactic grand pas de deux.

Now the adult dancer performs the role start to finish, so the ballerina has to appear believable as a 12-year-old.

Drosselmeier’s teenage nephew, the party guest Julien, has also been switched to an adult role, so the same male dancer transforms from Julien into the Nutcracker Prince who fights the Mouse King, then into the handsome human prince who partners the grown Clara.

Artistic director André Lewis says the key reason for dropping the child stars is that when the ballet tours, it is too costly and complicated to take along student dancers who need chaperones and must be away from home at Christmastime.

Also, with as many as five dancers rotating as the adult leads, it becomes impossible to convincingly match the child Clara and Julien with their adult counterparts in terms such as hair colour and body type.

"I think it’s a more readable transformation for the audience to just have one dancer play the character," says Sundermeier.

To portray a pre-teen girl, she says, "you have to go back to your childhood and remember how you felt when your parents would have a Christmas party… You’re introduced to a boy, but you’re not sure if you want to actually hang out with the boy."

Sundermeier notes that every emotion from delight to terror has to be conveyed by the whole body.

"It’s not like film, where they have close-up shots of your face. Just facial expressions isn’t going to do it."

In performances when she’s not Clara, Sundermeier is either the flashy Aunt Josephine in the party scene, followed by the Sugar Plum Fairy in Act II, or a snowflake soloist in Act I, then a Russian dancer in Act. II.

"I do have to check the casting every now and then, to make sure I’m going to be in the right costume at the right time," she says. "The last thing you want is a mixup, where someone thinks you’re doing it, but you’re thinking someone else is doing that role.

"But in terms of choreography, it’s all muscle memory. So once the music is on, it just comes naturally and I don’t really have to think about it."

Soloist Jennifer Welsman, who has played the adult Clara many times, says adding the child Clara to the role doesn’t make for an endurance test as tiring as, say, The Sleeping Beauty, because the party scene is quite easy for the ballerina.

In fact, the challenge with the old arrangement was to plunge into strenuous dancing so far into the show.

"It was a bit hard, before. You’d try and meet your partner in the rehearsal room (before the snow scene) and try a couple of moves… then go right onstage and perform a pas de deux, and hope you’re warm enough," recalls Welsman, 30.

"(Now) in the party scene you get warmed up, you get your pointe shoes broken in, and you have fun."

Lewis, the longtime artistic director, danced in Nutcracker himself as a child. This year, he and his wife, former RWB dancer Caroline Gruber, are passing the generational torch as Émilie Lewis, their nine-year-old daughter, plays one of the adorable angels.

She earned the role strictly on her own merits and Lewis stayed out of it, he says.

"She auditioned and she passed muster," he says. "I was nervous, actually."

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca

 

Nutty Club

The much-loved Nutcracker (the RWB doesn’t use "The" in the title) premiered in Russia in 1892. It became popular in North America in the 1950s.

The current RWB version, created in 1999 at a cost of $1 million, is set in a well-to-do Winnipeg home on Christmas Eve, 1913. It features Canadian touches such as hockey, Mounties, the Northern Lights and a comically hungry bear.

In 2006, the RWB introduced Peter Pan and started alternating it locally with Nutcracker as a Christmas ballet. But the company still tours Nutcracker every year.

The role of Drosselmeier, the toymaker who is the sorcerer of Clara’s dream, was expanded in 2007 and again this year. He now appears throughout the ballet, even mixing in with the Act II ethnic dances.

The best-known part of Tchaikovsky’s score is the Dance of the Sugar

Plum Fairy. The tinkly theme is played on a celesta, a kind of sophisticated toy piano. In the RWB’s version, the Sugar Plum Fairy is featured in the Waltz of the Flowers. The grown-up Clara gets the famous Sugar Plum music for a variation (solo section) in the climactic pas de deux.