The Nutcraker as Christmas decoration

 

In the town centre of Jesi, in the Marche Region, there has been an invasion of coloured, funny, soldiers as decoration of the main shops. In one shop two of these soldiers even appear in the window. What can this mean? Is Jesi being militarised?

No, it is not. I believe these funny-looking soldiers represent the nutcracker in the shape of a soldier that is one of the protagonists of a now famous ballet, called precisely The Nutcracker. Based on Alexandre Dumas, father’s story for children which, at the same time, was based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s dark tale, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, the ballet was choreographed by Marius Petipa, with the assistance of Lev Ivanov to Pitor Tchaikovsky’s stunning music and was performed for the first time in 1892.

It is divided into two acts and tells the story of the child Clara who receives a present on Christmas Eve, a present which is a nutcracker in the shape of a soldier. As she falls asleep the nutcracker becomes a man, a prince who, together with an army of other soldiers, engages in a battle against a group of mice, headed by the terrible Mouse King. Clara helps to kill the King with her slipper and goes with her prince to the Land of Sweets. There she meets various characters, among whom there is chocolate, exemplified by a Spanish dance, coffee, exemplified by an Arabic dance and tea, exemplified by a Chinese dance. Then there is the Sugar Plum fairy who dances a beautiful solo and who is sometimes interpreted by the same dancer who performs Clara. In some versions, at the end, Clara wakes up so as to say that the battle against the mice and the adventure in the Land of Seets were all a dream.

In the ballet there are some scenes that are now considered racist, like the representation of the Chinese dancers embodying tea. According to Ronald Alexander, 

The whole ballet tradition is inherently racist, so the traditional productions of Nutcracker can also be seen as racist. In many versions of Nutcracker, one sees overt racial stereotypes. In the second-act divertissements, many of the dances or variations are borderline caricatures, if not downright demeaning. For example, the way in which Asians have been portrayed in the Chinese variation—with heads bobbing up and down, index fingers protruding, and happy smirks of joy plastered on the dancers’ faces—is insulting and embarrassing. (Alexander quoted in Anonymous, 2013).

Various productions are attempting to change this aspect, but the question remains as to whether a tradition even though it bears a stereotype should be changed or kept for historical purposes. I think it should be changed as history can be told in books or other places, but living bodies on stage should represent something that reflects our time, not a racist past.

Returning to the Nutcracker, according to Mariella Guatterini, dancewise, it is characterised by three main waltzes: the waltz of the snowflakes, poetic and fast paced, the celebrated waltz of the flowers, sweet and harmonious and the final waltz, “the transfiguration itself of the idea of waltz” (Guatterini, 1998: 113).

Because it is set during the Christmas Eve, the ballet is being performed during this time of the year in many parts of the world. In a way, it has become a symbol for Christmas and that is why those funny-looking soldiers decorate the shops of Jesi’s town centre. It is a pity that there is no Nutcracker being performed in town and one wonders how many people do actually know the connection between the Nutcracker and Christmas to fully appreciate said soldiers. 

 

References

Anonymous,  "Burning Question: Is Nutcracker Racist?, Dance Magazine, 30 November 2013.

Guatterini, Marinella, L'ABC del balletto - La storia, i passi, i capolavori (Milan: Mondadori, 1998).

My article on Martha Graham's dance "Notes for a Study of Lear"

 

 

 

My article, "This great stage of fools: Martha Graham's dance 'Notes for a Study of Lear'" has been published on the European Journal of American Culture some months ago. Here is the link to the abstract and other details.

Spadolini at the Fellini Museum

 

Alberto Spadolini, photo Dora Maar

 

 

In 1978 Marco Travaglini, Alberto Spadolini’s nephew, found a box filled with documents about his uncle. The box was put aside for years but in 2004, Travaglini began analysing those documents and was able to find many more. Quite a few of these documents are stunning photographs of Spadolini mainly in dance poses. Twenty-five of said photographs are now on display at the Fellini Museum in Rimini, Italy. The image chosen for the exhibition advertisement card is by Dora Maar and shows a graceful portrait of Spadolini, with a scarf around his neck and a small sphere in his left hand.

The exhibition opened on 24 March and was due to close on 16 April, but given the good response of the visitors, it has been extended until 1 May. On 30 March, 6 and 13 April the exhibition was also enriched by the screening of two documentaries: 2019 Spadò – Il danzatore nudo by Riccardo de Angelis and Romeo Marconi and 1951 Nous, les gitans by Alberto Spadolini himself.

I went to visit the exhibition on 13 April and was overwhelmed by the beauty of the photographs. Some of them have been published in my book on Spadolini (in Italian) and some in Travaglini’s books on his uncle. I commented the photographs for the visitors present that evening and seeing them all lined up was a feast for the eyes:

There was one of the very few images of Spadolini together with Josephine Baker where Baker is wearing a long tutu and ballet shoes, presumably for her ballet-insipred dances; there were some of the photographs portraying Spadolini as a nude dancer, like the one by Studio Piaz where he stands erect in a particularly virile pose; there was one portraying him in an Oriental costume, what I think might have been the costume for his work Cambodge, inspired by Cambodian culture; there were some dedicated to his Spanish-inspired dances, with a costume recalling that of a torero.

During the guided tour, ph. M. Travaglini

 Spadolini was a music hall dancer in 1930s Paris, but he also tried to move away from the music hall into theatre dance, as it happened with his 1933 Gala de danse, organised together with flamenco dancer Nati Morales.

The 2019 documentary presented a nice picture of Spadolini, with a focus on Travaglini’s 1978 discovery of the box, Spadolini’s ties with Gabiele d’Annunzio and his possible role as a spy during World War II. Here is the trailer (in Italian): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVZlhLCvEgo

Spadolini’s own 1951 documentary was dedicated to Gypsy culture. There he appears in an interesting dance, in one of his almost nude attires. The documentary is also watchable online at the following link (it is in French): https://www.cinematheque.fr/henri/film/116989-nous-les-gitans-alberto-spadolini-1950/

This exhibition is an important event to celebrate Spadolini and his art as a dancer (he was also a painter, actor and a lot more) and I highly recommend it.

 

André Levinson on dance

Joan Acocella, Lynn Garafola, edited by, André Levinson on Dance – Writing from Paris in the Twenties, Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1991. 

 André Levinson was a Russian emigré who, in 1921, left his country with his wife Lubov and thier daughter Marie. His life as an intellectual of the pre-Revolution era had been destroyed and he was in danger. He was proficient in French and in Paris he bagan working for newspapers such as Comoedia. He wrote about many subjects, but his favourite one was dance. 

He was erudite and had a beautiful writing style. Moreover, he spoke from principle as he was probably the first critic to champion pure versus expressive dance. In other words, he thought dance had value in itself, not just as imitation of other arts. 

This is a thorny question even today as choreographers, critics and scholars are divided between what we may call a formalist and a narrative approach. Does narrative dance imply the imitation of another art, like, say, literature? It is not necessarily so. The frequent creation of dance adaptations of ballets such as Giselle or Swan Lake brings us to think that narrative is a significant part of dance history, not just the imitation of another art. 

Returning to Levinson, he also described dance, thus giving his readers a glimpse of what he had seen. The present book gathers together the essays (all except for two) Levinson wrote for the North American Theatre Arts Monthly and are a very good example of his vision. 

Edited by Joan Acocella and Lynn Garafola, these essays cover various types of dance, like ballet, Spanish dance and what was then called Negro jazz dance. In particular, Levinson was devoted to ballet, criticised the Ballets Russes and exalted Maria Taglioni. In “The Spirit of the Classic Dance”, he individuates three main aspects of ballet, like verticality, turnout and elevation, while in “The Spirit of the Spanish Dance” he asserts that it “can best be expressed by a curved line”. 

In “A Crisis in the Ballets Russes”, he points out that “the ballet master, Michel Fokine, sacrificed the forms of abstract movement for expression, pure dance for pantomime”. And in “The Anatomy of a Sylph: Concerning the Beauty of Marie Taglioni”, he analyses Taglioni’s physical characteristics, de facto deifying her, as Marian Smith has highlighted. 

In her essay, “The disappearing danseur”, Smith states that Levinson overlooks the fact that Romantic ballets actually told stories and that La Sylphide was not the only successful ballet of the period. Furthermore, according to her, Levinson was possibly the first to coin the expression ‘ballet blanc’ and contributed to the belief that men were “evicted” from ballet, something she proves to be wrong. 

In André Levinson on Dance, the most racist essay is the one dedicated to black jazz dance: he calls it “primitive dancing”, stating that “the Negro frenzy, although it is completely devoid of any nobility and almost ‘pre-human’, if not actually bestial, can attain to a positive grandeur”. In this sense, this and the other essays have an important historical value and represent a way in which dance was seen in the 1920s. They need to be considered as such, a sign of those times, not absolute truths. 

Levinson also wrote about Alberto Spadolini, as it is reported in Spadolini’s 1946 “Quelques extraits de presse”. He affirms that his postures and gestures “know how to reach an eloquent nobility”. He also highlights “a beautiful touch of acrobatics in his technique” connecting it “to the great Italian ballet masters of the nineteenth century”. So far, I have not been able to place this fragment within Levinson’s work, but it is an interesting point of view on Spadolini. 

Levinson was probably one of the first dance critics in the modern sense of the word. Included in the volume are other essays, like “The Modern Dance in Germany”, “Javanese Dancing: The Spirit and the Form” and the much quoted “The Idea of the Dance: From Aristotle to Mallarmé”. The book is also enriched by a bibliography of Levinson’s writings and by sixteen pages of illustrations. 

 

Further References 

Smith, Marian, “The disappearing danseur”, Cambridge Opera Journal, 19, 1, 2007, pp. 33-57. 

“Spadolini – Quelques extraits de presse”, Paris 1946, Bolero-Spadò Archive.

 

 

Ailey II now streaming (until 2 October 2022)

 

An image from The Hunt as performed by six men.

Two of Ailey II’s performances are now available on the Ailvin Ailey website and YouTube until October 2, see this link. Ailey II, as The New York Times has stated, is the younger version of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and is characterised by likewise energy and brilliance. The performances in question are Robert Battle’s The Hunt (2001) and Takademe (1999). Battle is the current artistic director of the Company and, in this case, has devised a refreshing change for both these works: The Hunt was originally danced by men while in this version it is performed by women and Takademe was a solo which is now danced by the whole Company.

The Hunt is an “athletic work for six men” that “reveals the predatory side of human nature and the primitive thrill of the hunt”. In this version danced by four women and restaged by Elisa Clark, the movement quality is different and there is a body fluidity absent in the initial work. The opening image recalls the rarefied atmosphere of an Edward Hopper’s painting thanks to Burke Wilmore’s striking lighting. The high-paced and percussive music by Les Tambours de Bronx immediately starts, creating a stark contrast with the dancers’ initial stillness. Then, as the dance begins, a vigorous pulsating energy emanates from the dancers’ bodies. They move in circles, bend their torso, walk, run and go to the floor mainly in pairs, but also all together. Mia McSwain’s costumes consist of long black skirts with red under layers and red tops. The skirts move along with the dancers’ movements creating a dazzling visual effect.

The title of this piece recalls Tero Saarinen’s Hunt (2002), a solo which represents his version of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring, set to Stravinsky’s celebrated music. There, Saarinen plays with a long and wide skirt as well, a sort of white tutu made of panels of fabric where, at one point, images of himself are projected. There is a moonlike and hypnotising atmosphere. Saarinen’s intent was to focus on the giant quantity of information with which we are bombarded every day. In Battle’s The Hunt there is a raw energy and a physicality that bring the dancers to perform a tour de force without rest. We are almost left out of breath at the end of it. That is also why it is so brilliant! 

Takademe “mixes humor and high-flying movement in a savvy deconstruction of Indian Kathak dance rhythms”. Restaged by Kanji Segawa, it presents the whole Company instead of a solo interpreter. This means that the movement of the initial version is amplified and it reverberates through a collective group of dancers. In this case there is a more delicate and precise movement quality with respect to The Hunt. The dancers, for example, cross their arms, perform a small kick and bend in a flowy way. Sheila Chandra’s music contributes to this lighter atmosphere, highlighting each dancer’s move.

This dance reminded me of Martha Graham’s Satyric Festival Song (1932), a playful solo made of irony and wit, where the dancer jumps and walks tossing her hair up and down. Both these works are elegant and refined and humorous. I wonder how Graham’s solo would look like if it were performed by a group as Takademe was. Food for thought, thanks Ailey II!

Constructing a garden made of kinetic hendecasyllables: Virgilio Sieni's Paradiso

 

Photo by Renato Esposito.

Going back to the theatre to watch a dance performance has been a great experience, filled with emotions and excitement. I therefore immediately thank my friend Stefania Zepponi for having convinced me to go with her. We went to Pesaro, at the Teatro sperimentale to watch Virgilio Sieni’s Paradiso [Paradise] on October 13th. It was a cold and windy night that did not diminish our will to experience live perfomance.

Sieni’s work is only formally inspired by Dante’s Paradiso, in that it takes his use of hendecasyllables and turns then into movement, the choreography “is the construction of a garden. Everything happens by searching for the measure to build a garden where one can deposit in the breath of the plants the memory of the dance”. It is a minimal narrative, but very effective. It presupposes a sort of symbiotic relationship between dancers and plants and more than once the dancers perform the headstand with bent legs, as if to recall the plants’ flourishing.

The dance can be divided into three parts:

1 – Five bare-chested men dance with four plants in their hands;

2 – Five men wearing t-shirts dance together without plants;

3 – Five bare-chested men dance with a lot of plants, constructing a garden.

The first part opens with an almost dark stage where, little by little, some plants become visible. Soon we realise they are plants placed in vases held by dancers. They initially form a cluster where it is difficult to see either the dancers or each single plant. Then the cluster gets disentangled even though the dancers often remain grouped following the one dancer who is without a plant. The music, composed by Paolo Damiani, is hypnotic. It is a bit static section but highly evocative of the love Sieni is advocating.

As he writes in the programme notes, the dance “does not report the word of Dante’s Divine Comedy, it does not attempt to translate the text into movement, but it places itself on the threshold of a suspension, it tries to gather the primordial, liberating and vertiginous gesture of love”. Is he talking about love in general? Or love between humans? Or even love for nature?

In the second part there are more dynamic phrases, with some of them slowly performed as if the audience were asked to look at every single detail the body does while moving. The music becomes more high paced.

The third part presents many plants in the background with the dancers slowly taking one plant at a time to bring it forward on the stage. It is a coral section with some solo moments where the music is again quite hypnotic.

“The choreography is built upon hendecassyllables made of gestures” and the measured phrases, some of the sequences which are repeated and the grouping and ungrpouping of the dancers may represent the work Sieni has done to trasmute Dante’s hendecasyllables into movement. There is more as “the verses of the dance find back the resounding of the rhyme from a tercet to the other”, thus recalling Dante’s interlocked tercet. It is a daring but convincing approach. The idea of the garden construction is also very interesting and the dances with the plants poignant and suggestive.

However, it is not clear why did Sieni choose five men to perform this piece. Women seem to be banned from his Paradise. Even though he does not write about it in the programme notes, his choice stands out as weird and unclear. As Ramsay Burt has highlighted, the representation of gender in dance is not irrelevant and even a mainly formalist approach to dance should take it into account as dance is not a neutral art.

My book in Italian on Alberto Spadolini

 

Nearly a year ago my book in Italian, Alberto Spadolini, Apollo della danza [Alberto Spadolini, Apollo of the Dance] was published by Affinità Elettive. Here is the translation of the book summary:

Alberto Spadolini (1907-1972) was a painter, dancer ad a lot more, but dance constitutes the fil rouge of his career. Born in a turbulent Ancona, he spent his formative years in Rome and had his debut in France in 1932, becoming famous as a music-hall dancer in La Joie de Paris, with Josephine Baker. In an interview he defines himself as ‘anarchist’ and in 1933 he performs in the Gala de danse, a performance of ‘pure’ dance where we can perceive an authorial line that distances him from the music-hall. In spite of the fact that he wears costumes of different kinds, he is classified as a ‘nude dancer’ by the press. This is due to his statuesque body that he shows in some dances. From the 1940s he begins to paint a series of paintings dedicated to ballerinas, recalling, in some aspects, Edgar Degas. Analysing even very rare documents, the present study explores the relationship Spadolini had with dance, illustrating another name with which he was known: Apollo of the Dance.