Chico is a relatively small place, which means that our local community ballet company is also relatively small. They only do one full-length ballet a year, so they switch off: they do The Nutcracker every other year, and varying other ballets in non-Nutcracker years. This year was a Nutcracker year. I love The Nutcracker, and I love their version of it. They have community members play some of the adult roles: two of my mom's friends are Mother Goose and a maid, and the District Attorney plays Clara's father. They use the same costumes year after year, which also gives it a continuity. And because it's a smallish community, you get to see the kids grow up through the years. The tiny girls who played the angels this year will be the Claras and Sugar Plum Fairies of the future.
There were two very interesting things about this year's production. First, they had more men. The Sugar Plum Fairy has always and forever been a solo role in their production, but this year they gave her a Cavalier. Instead of having a waltz of the flowers, they had The Grand Cotillion, with Debutantes and their male Escorts. I was extra excited that one of my favorite dancers (partly because her movement is so natural and partly because she's the only one who would smile at me from the very beginning when I took class with the teenagers) got to dance a pas de deux role, which I haven't seen her do before. Secondly, for the Arabian Dance, they had The Peacock and The Sultan. By making the girl a Peacock instead of a harem girl, they completely desexualized the dance, even though they used a lot of the traditional movements, including the lift where she's on his shoulder and his whole hand is covering her stomach.
I tried this morning to find a good Nutcracker excerpt for today's treat, but my time is limited and I didn't quite manage it. So instead have this, Patricia McBride and Mikhail Baryshnikov in Balanchine's Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, 1979. It's still Tchaikovsky, and it looks perfectly effortless, especially the lifts.
