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There is something
mysterious about The Nutcracker. It’s not just Drosselmayer’s character
casting spells or bringing machines to life. The Nutcracker has become a
Christmas tradition in the United States, but no one is sure why. “The
Nutcracker,” Jack Anderson writes, “invites commentators to spin theoretical
webs in an attempt to answer such questions as, ‘What does it all mean?’ or
‘Just why is it that the Nutcracker is so popular?’” People have dedicated
entire books to figuring out the meaning of it all. In one of those books, Nutcracker Nation, Jennifer Fisher
begins her analysis by addressing the same mystery: Dancers wanted to know why they wore their toes down to the same tunes every year; artistic directors wanted to know why people thought they owned the ballet and were opinionated about its every aspect; parents wanted to know why their children were desperate to progress from mouse to snowflake, from bon-bon to flower soloist. And everyone wanted to know why, when they ostensibly disdained the cliches of The Nutcracker, they got tears in their eyes every time miniature angels tripped onstage or the Sugar Plum Fairy leaped into her cavalier’s arms to all those wonderfully overwrought crescendos in the grand pas de deux. The
Nutcracker began as a German fairy tale. It then became a Russian ballet, and
now, in its latest incarnation, it has become an American ritual. Fisher
calls the thousands of Nutcracker productions that get performed every year
at Christmastime “a secular ritual.” Fisher tries to be the social scientist,
citing Dance anthropologist Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull, who claims that this
“ballet should be studied in relation to its social, institutional, and
cultural contexts, just as one wold approach the dance forms of Ghana or
Bali,” but her involvement is more than clinical. She has devoted years of
her life to performing just one ballet, and she can’t understand why she and
so many other Americans have invested so much time in it. The Nutcracker gave
Fisher “a secular way to share in seasonal celebrations,” and that is
important because Americans “are reluctant to commit wholeheartedly to the
well-worn rituals and ceremonies of church, state, or theater; yet here is
still a longing to commemorate, to celebrate together, to dig deeper, to
believe in something true” even if this involves “the taming of Christmas.”
The Nutcracker celebrates “the innocence of childhood, rites of passage, and
dreams coming true.” The Nutcracker is an “invented tradition,” like Hannukah
and “Kwanzaa.” The Nutcracker proposes the best of both worlds: it was “elite
but accessible, serious but fun, decorative but meaningful. . . . it wasn’t
snooty like some ballets could be, yet it benefited from the rarefied
elegance so often associated with the art form.”
I never
saw a performance of the Nutcracker as a child growing up in Philadelphia in
the 1950s, but my three youngest children, two of whom were girls, have never
known a world without The Nutcracker. Sarah Jones began dancing in the
Southold Dance Theater production of the Nutcracker when she was five years
old. Her brother Sam followed in her footsteps two years later, and now Sam
is ready to embark upon a career in ballet because of one particular ballet.
The Nutcracker, in my own experience, was less a ritual than a portal to a
number of different worlds, all of them alien to life in South Bend, Indiana
in the early years of the 21st century. Fisher’s
inability to explicate the mysterious attraction which The Nutcracker exerts
over American families lies primarily in the categories she brings to her
explication. Dance, she tells us citing Sociologist Angela McRobbie,
“operates as a metaphor for an external reality which is unconstrained by the
limits and expectations of gender identity and which successfully and relatively
painlessly transports its subjects from a passive to a more active psychic
position.”
The
main problem American critics encounter in their attempt to analyze The
Nutcracker lies in the categories which inform their analysis. Jennifer
Fisher is like the Canadian film critic who said that horror movies were
about sexual represssion, because, as a homosexual, he felt that everything
was about sexual repression. Sexual repression was also part of everyone’s
conventional narrative in the wake of the cultural revolution of the 1960s.
As a result, he concluded that the ‘70s were a sexually repressive decade,
because the horror genre got started then, when in fact, the exact opposite
was the case. Fisher’s
mind is so saturated with the revolutionary categories which have taken up
their abode in academe and the institutions academe controls she can’t see
The Nutcracker as the quintessentially counter-revolutionary work. Every Year
parents from the suburbs surrounding South Bend, Indiana bring their children
to the Nutcracker audition to recreate the lost world they never knew. When
the yearly Nutcracker auditions roll around at Southold Dance Theater in
South Bend, Indiana, it’s Christmas at the Stahlbaum house inside, but
outside it’s the aftermath of the cultural revolution. As you pull into the
Southold parking lot you can hear the glass-rattling thump-thump of
sub-woofer hip-hop from the cars passing by on Lincoln Way West. South Bend,
Indiana is a typical mid-Western city. It was once part of the industrial
powerhouse that drove the American economy and helped defeat Fascism in World
War II. Now it lays gutted and dying like a Buffalo killed for its tongue. South
Bend has been devastated by the social engineering of the ‘50s and the
cultural revolution of the ‘60s. The straw that broke the camel’s back was
the property tax increase of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Thousands of homeowners and landlords who could not afford the taxes simply
abandoned their homes. In fact, in 2007, 1,800 homes, taking up 10 pages in 9
point type in the local newspaper, were auctioned off in a sheriff’s sale. But
in spite of everything the parents keep coming year after year. Southold
Dance Theater was founded 35 years ago as a modern repertory company. It then
evolved into a company that put on the Nutcracker once a year because this
was the only dance event that could sustain it in existence. Gradually, the
dance repertoire became more classical, and as it did Southold unwitting
began to occupy a forward position in the culture wars. Since Southold is
primarily a school, the main question for parents became, why should my child
invest his or her time in this activity? Why not basketball, the traditional
winter-time activity for young people in Indiana? Why not soccer, which
threatened to usurp basketball’s pre-eminence by the late ‘70s? The,
for the most part, unarticulated answer to all of those questions involved
transcendental terms like truth, the good, and beauty, all of which play a
foundational role in what it means to be a human being, but none of which
ever got articulated convincingly in America. America has always prided
itself on its pragmatism, on its ability to do practical things. Now in an
outpost of post-industrial America like South Bend, nothing much gets made
anymore and little gets done, but mothers are still driven by transcendental
desires when it comes to raising their children, and so they bring them each
year to the auditions for The Nutcracker, where beauty still has some
concrete presence in their lives once a year.
So the
Nutcracker may very well be a ritual, but it’s more than a symbolic ritual
which involves the slaying of the rat king every year around the time of the
winter solstice. Primitive cultures used dance as a form of sympathetic
magic, assuming that if dance could bring the body and mind under control, it
could bring elements like wind, rain, earth and fire under control as well. E. Michael Jones is editor of Culture Wars Magazine.
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