From Sinister to Sweet: The Strange Tale of the Nutcracker by Catherine Hokin

A deeply creepy inventor ‘uncle’, a seven-headed mouse, a little girl who tears her arm open on broken glass and a curse which traps first a queen and then a boy inside the misshapen body of a giant nutcracker: what better story to entertain your little ones with this Christmas? 

For the next few weeks theatre foyers will mill with children stickily clutching wands and toy soldiers and waiting to be inducted into the wonderful Christmas world of The Nutcracker, a ballet with far darker origins than their sugar plum fairy and sweetie-filled heads can possibly imagine.

The Nutcracker was first performed on the 18th December 1892 at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, set to music by Tchaikovsky. The book on which this ballet was based - Histoire d’une Casse-Noisette by Alexandre Dumas - was not, however, the original story. That first appeared in 1816, in ETA Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. 

Hoffmann wrote a number of spooky stories that were set to music during the 19th century. One of these, The Sandman which is about about evil inventors who create a robotic girl, appears in the Offenbach opera, The Tales of Hoffmann and likely inspired the ballet Coppelia, in which a young man who falls in love with a life-size dancing doll. The original Hoffmann story, as outlined above, is a complex thing which blurs fantasy and reality. The rodents are cursed, the parents are oppressive and cruel and the little girl at the centre of the story runs away to her nightmare/dream world and does not return.

The Dumas version, which continues to form the basis of the ballet, simplified the plot and made the story rather more gentle. In this version, Clara rejects the fantasy world and wakes up happy and smiling under the Christmas tree, a Hollywood-style ending which was largely the reason for the ballet’s future success. And its success was very much in the future. In 1892, the unimpressed Russian critics called the choreography confusing, the libretto lopsided and the whole experience (according to the St Petersburg Gazette) “the most tedious thing I have ever seen.” After the first Russian Revolution in 1905, the ballet was dropped from the repertoire and, in a twist Hoffmann (and his fan Edgar Allen Poe) may have appreciated, its principal male lead, Sergei Legat, slit his throat.

Many of the Mariinsky dancers scattered across Europe in the early twentieth century and the ballet re-appeared, first in Budapest in 1927 and then in London in 1934. 

It took an American showman, however, to bring The Nutcracker fully back into the light. In 1940, Walt Disney used the entire Tchaikovsky score in Fantasia, bringing the music to a huge new audience. On Christmas Eve 1944 the San Francisco Ballet performed the first complete version of the ballet and in 1954 George Balanchine’s New York production turned the ballet into the classic Land of Snow and Kingdom of Sweets version we recognise today. Where America went, the rest of the world followed: more companies have performed The Nutcracker than any other ballet. In 2015 the Royal Ballet December production was beamed live to 2000 cinemas and, according to Daniel J Wakin of the New York Times, its holiday run “is generally the foundation of an American dance company”.

Why has The Nutcracker become so popular that even non-ballet fans, who would run a mile at a suggestion of an evening with Les Sylphides, are happy to be dragged along? 

Perhaps because it truly is family-friendly: it has parts for over 35 children; a pattern of short, highly-charged dances and watered-down cute mice and dancing toys. Perhaps because, in the words of Isabel McMeekan, founder of Everyday Ballet and a former dancer, it is“the eternal fantasy of Christmas come to life on stage…the girl, the guy, the dream, the magic tree that grows to 7 feet, the glittery snowflakes.” Or perhaps because it has proved so adaptable. As well as traditional outings, there have been hip-hop, LGBT and Jewish versions and, my own personal favourite, Matthew Bourne’s Dickensian orphanage with its pyjama-clad cupids and cast of very wicked sweets (check out the exceedingly sticky Knickerbocker Glory). 

And in that, I think, lies the ballet’s endurance – to paraphrase one supermarket’s ad: however you do Christmas, there’s a Nutcracker for you.

Tamara Karsavina: Stravinsky's First Firebird by Janie Hampton

Tamara Karsavina in the studio of Wilhelm-Alfred Eberlin.
His self portrait is on the shelf, 1910.

This is the story of a British diplomat and a Russian prima ballerina caught up in the October 1917 Russian revolution, and their dramatic escape with their love-child.
In old age, relatives sometimes reveal family stories that are not secrets, they have just not mentioned them before. In her eighties, my mother told me that her father’s cousin had been a British diplomat during the 1917 revolution, and his lover was a Russian ballerina who had first danced Stravinsky’s The Firebird. I wanted to know more, so my daughter Daisy and I flew to St Petersburg. We visited the Imperial Stage School, with its original practice rooms, and the Marinsky Theatre, unchanged since its construction in 1860. We also found their apartment, now the premises of the Russian Red Cross Society, and discovered archives no-one had seen since 1917.

Henry James Bruce (1880-1951) was brought up in a stately home in Northern Ireland, built by Italian architects for his ancestor the Earl of Bristol. Henry’s father, Sir Hervey Juckes Bruce preferred animals to humans. He kept a tame grouse and a hare loose in the house; and his own pack of fox-hounds. One evening at dinner he said to the dowager on his right, "May I peel this peach for you? It’s too ripe for the monkey." Henry was educated at Eton and Oxford. In order to pass his entrance exam into the Foreign Office, he picked up French prostitutes in The Strand and gave them lunch in exchange for conversation. His good looks, intelligence and charm helped his promotion in 1913, to Head of Chancery at the British Embassy in St Petersburg at only 35 years. In addition to being highly skilled in de-cyphering codes, he was also an accomplished painter and writer.

Henry James Bruce in 1907.

Tamara Platonovna Karsavina (1885-1978) spent eight years of her childhood coping with the strict and punishing regime of the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg, boarding for 50 weeks of the year. At fifteen, she performed for Tsar Nicholas II and his cousin the German Kaiser, and when she graduated aged 17 her exceptional proficiency was noticed and she was appointed as a soloist at the Marinsky Ballet. She toured Europe with classics such as Giselle and Les Sylphides.

Graduation from Imperial Ballet School, Theatre Street, 

St Petersburg, 1902. Karsavina is on the far right, aged 17. 

Ballerinas were usually considered to be merely decorative but the Russian intelligentsia embraced Tamara. Her beauty, technical perfection and intelligence enchanted and inspired choreographers, composers and designers. As Nijinsky's first dance partner, Tamara worked with impresario Diaghilev, artists Benois, Picasso and Matisse, the poet Potemkin, and the choreographer Michel Fokine. In 1909, she introduced Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to London and a year later inspired Igor Stravinsky to compose The Firebird . She influenced not only the theatre and dancing but also fashion, music and culture, all over Europe.

Rehearsal with Diaghlev's Ballet Russe company, probably 1910.
Seated at the piano is Stravinsky, Fokine is standing, Karsavina in centre in tutu. 

Henry and Tamara first met in 1913 at the Stray Dog Arts Café, a crowded cellar of Bohemian artists and poets. She danced barefoot among flowers to music written specially by Zelenski, played on an upright piano. Tamara had been having English lessons with the novelist Hugh Walpole (1884-1941), head of British propaganda in St Petersburg, who described Henry as "too handsome for his high intelligence". Henry and Tamara soon fell in love but she was already married to a dull aristocratic banker named Vasili Moukine. 

Vasili Moukine c 1915

In July 1914, Tamara danced in Debussy’s Daphnis et Chloe and Strauss’s Cleopatre at London’s Drury Lane. She was performing in Paris when war broke out that August. Determined to re-join the Imperial Ballet and Henry, she learned that the Russian border with Germany was closed, so travelled alone via Dover and Finland. In 1915 Tamara became pregnant and Moukine agreed to give her up, even though divorce was not possible under Russian Orthodox law. Despite the war in Europe, Tamara and Henry continued working in Petrograd, and lived together as a family, with baby Nikita.

Tamara Karsavina as Pharaoh's Daughter, circa 1904

On October 24, 1917, Henry wrote in his diary, “At 7 o’clock I left the Embassy to go to the ballet where I arrived peacefully by tram. The others [his embassy colleagues] arrived later, having all been arrested en route and taken to the barracks of the Pavlosk regiment, where they were apparently treated quite civilly and given a bit of paper to allow them to proceed.” The ballet that evening was The Nutcracker composed by Tchaikovsky in 1892, with Tamara as the Sugar Plum Fairy. “Tamara danced magnificently and had a tremendous reception. But the poor Marinsky was the ghost of itself, the stage half empty. After the ballet Tamara, Madam B and myself went by tram up to the Suviroff Square and proceeded to walk down the Millionaya, barred by pickets. The first person we met was a completely unperturbed Havery engaged in explaining to a soldier in his peerless Cockney Russian that he couldn’t help the soldier’s troubles; he had some letters to post, battle or no battle." Mr. Havery was the British Embassy messenger who had arrived in Russia 20 years earlier. Through thick and thin he ensured that embassy post was always delivered. In the preceding few days there had been intermittent gun-fire at night, but it was never clear who was shooting at whom.

“Everything had been quiet in the rest of the town, so we were surprised to find the Lord’s own holy racket going on round the Winter Palace, where the Government was putting up a last stand – field-guns, machine-guns, rifle fire, a destroyer from the river et tout le tremblement. Never heard such a row. Altogether the walk a very jumpy business.” They gathered that all the lift bridges across the River Neva were up, thus cutting off the north of the city, and a destroyer was pointing its guns at the Winter Palace, at the far end of their street. There was no electricity in their apartment and to take their minds off the sound of machine guns, they played cards by candlelight. “The last thing we heard last night was that everything is in favour of the Government and the Revolutionary Committee had been arrested. After supper I escorted Madame B home to a machine-gun obbligato and so to a very noisy bed.
“This morning early nobody knew what had happened, though it seemed pretty clear that the Government was down and out. This became increasingly clear as the day went on, until we heard that the whole town was in the hands of the Bolsheviks who had taken the State Bank, Telephone, etc.”  The next day Henry’s diary entry said simply, "Arrived safely at the Embassy to learn that Lenin was Prime Minister, Trotzky Foreign Minister."

Tamara Karsavina and Nikita Bruce in Petrograd, 1917

After the October Revolution, life grew steadily worse and everyone was a potential enemy. Despite Lenin’s great plans, there were still huge debts from the 1914 war; political and social anarchy; and a collapsed economy. During that winter, food became so scarce that after performances Tamara was presented with bags of flour, instead of flowers. Even so, she sometimes fainted after dancing. Tamara was no Tsarist: during the revolution in 1905, she and her friend, the dancer Anna Pavlova, had organised a dancers’ strike in solidarity with the factory workers. Tamara was threatened with dismissal, but saved by the Tsar's amnesty for strikers. She had welcomed the Tsar's abdication in March 1917, and she was relieved when the Bolshevik government insisted that the Marinsky should continue at the state’s expense. She was voted president of the Marinsky Theatre's Soviet Council, but nobody trusted anyone. The gilded imperial eagles in the theatre were ripped down, and the attendants' satin livery was replaced with military jackets. As part of the policy of the redistribution of decision-making, the carpenters chose the Marinsky’s programme. However their choices were based not on any knowledge of opera or ballet, but on which sets were easiest to construct. There was even talk of nationalising women, in order to re-distribute the beautiful wives of merchants among the factory workers.
In March 1918, fearing possible foreign invasion, Lenin moved the capital from Petrograd to Moscow, so all embassies had to move too. Three months later he declared Britain the enemy of the Bolshevik government, and British diplomats were ordered home, south via the Crimea. However, Henry travelled north to Petrograd to be with Tamara, and their 19-month-old son Nikita. In their spacious apartment in Millionaya Street, the ‘Park Lane’ of Russia, lived Nikita’s nursemaid, their Polish cook and Tamara’s old nanny. Now they also shared it with five other families, one to each room. There was only one kitchen and constant arguments between the women over the washing hanging in the passage. Water still flowed from the tap, but it was contaminated with cholera, and there was little fuel to boil it. The trees in the park had all been felled and even the wooden street cobbles had been dug up.
Because Nikita was half-British, and Tamara the lover of a British diplomat, they were both at risk of being denounced as enemies and imprisoned. As Tamara recalled 12 years later: “Rumours multiplied like microbes in a diseased body. Newspapers born overnight spread panicky informations and coined libels.” Tamara and Henry decided they had to leave Russia with Nikita as soon as possible. But all routes out of Petrograd were closed.
In the next instalment, find out how these lovers from opposing nations and clashing cultures, crossed lakes, marshes, forests and oceans, and survived revolution, capture and storms. 

Part Two is next month on November 27.

Tamara Karsavina in The Firebird, 1910.

Note: St Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in 1914. In 1924 it was changed to Leningrad, and back to St Petersburg in 1991.

The shape of grace - by H.M. Castor

Vaslav Nijinsky (1889/90-1950) & Tamara Karsavina (1885-1978)
in 'Le Spectre de la Rose', 1911[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Since today is the birthday of Vaslav Nijinsky, one of the most famous dancers in history, I thought I’d write a post about ballet and, in particular, about one way in which the dance world has changed since Nijinsky was at the height of his career, a century ago.

Ballet, as you may have seen, has been in the spotlight recently (pardon the pun). Last month Channel 4 aired a series called Big Ballet, in which ex-dancers Wayne Sleep and Monica Loughman coached amateurs who were considered ‘oversized’ for professional dance training, and cast them in a special performance of Swan Lake. Meanwhile, two other ex-dancers, Dame Beryl Grey and Dame Gillian Lynne (both now in their 80s), gave an interview to The Guardian’s dance critic Judith Mackrell in which they poured scorn on claims that professional dancers are currently pushed too hard. They suggested that, on the contrary, life is much more comfortable for dancers now than it was in their day, and that today's dancers are, if anything, cossetted.

As Mackrell pointed out in two articles on the subject (read them here and here), this is not the first time that an older generation of dancers has grumbled about modern ways. And, though it is undoubtedly true that dancers in Grey and Lynne’s era worked incredibly hard without the rehearsal facilities and the physiotherapy support from which many of today’s dancers benefit, nevertheless the assertion that – despite all the hardships – “we just danced and enjoyed every minute” does carry a whiff, for me, of the famous ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ comedy sketch (if you’ve never had the pleasure of watching it, click here).

But what interests me most in all this is the question of female dancers’ weight. In response to concerns about starvation diets, Gillian Lynne told Judith Mackrell, “I've always had to watch my food. There's nothing wrong with it. Most dancers want to be slim. Quite honestly, dancers have to diet. You have to be underweight.” And the Telegraph journalist Tom Rowley, reviewing an episode of Big Ballet, reported that the reaction of Derek Deane (a former director of the English National Ballet) when asked his view on the (larger) dancers’ chances of success in their project was, frankly, sneering.

I know that the pressure on dancers to be slim is, in itself, nothing new. But definitions of 'slim' have changed. If we look at this Ballets Russes programme from 1914:

 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

…and then at this 1955 advert featuring American ballerina Maria Tallchief:

[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

…and, finally, at this picture of current ballet star Alina Cojocaru:

Alina Cojocaru and Vadim Muntagirov 

in 'Le Corsaire', English National Ballet, October 2013

by ASH (English National Ballet) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

…it is clear, surely, that over the last century a pretty dramatic change in ballet’s aesthetic ideal, in terms of women’s physique, has taken place. Some may argue that since dancers today are more athletic than their forebears, the change in body shape is down to long hours of exercise only. That may be true in some individual cases, but certainly not in all. 

Others may argue that this is simply a practical issue. Choreography today includes many complicated lifts that cannot be performed if the woman is too heavy. But this is a chicken and egg situation. Why were these lifts created in the first place? Why were they dreamt up by choreographers (who are, significantly, mostly male – but that’s another whole discussion) who could just as well have created different moves? It seems to me it’s perhaps been a cumulative process: the lighter female dancers have become, the more choreographers have been able to push the boundaries, and this in turn has put pressure on the women to become thinner still. Female dancers, however slender they are, dread being known as the heaviest girl in the class – it is thoroughly shaming to know that the boys in your ballet school, or the men in your company, do not want to be paired with you because you are harder to lift than your classmates. And, beyond that, the bottom line is that if you do not look right - if you are not thin enough - you will not get work.

Tamara Karsavina was a world-famous Russian prima ballerina.
She was also one of the founders of modern British ballet.
Here she is shown in costume for 'Les Papillons', 1912
Photographer unknown [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

American ballerina Sarah Lamb taking a curtain call
after dancing 'La Fin du Jour' with The Royal Ballet (2007)
by Scillystuff at en.wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)],
from Wikimedia Commons

Of course you could argue that if some women decide to make such a rarefied and eccentric art form their profession, they should simply accept that unnatural thinness is one of the requirements. But two things bother me about this.

One is that ballet is a popular hobby amongst girls, and they tend to start lessons when they are very little. In beginner classes at the age of 4 or 5, their size won’t be commented on. But if they fall in love with dancing and carry on training with any commitment, the messages about weight will most likely become very clear at or before puberty. I remember, as a schoolgirl, being in a ballet organisation in which every girl who was considered by the teacher to be overweight (which meant, in that context, not positively thin) was hauled out in front of the entire class and interrogated about her eating habits, meal by meal. It was shaming, and meant to be so. It terrified the girls who weren't singled out, as well as those who were. We were all about 12. And it is clear from the comments of the women who took part in Big Ballet that this was not an isolated case. 

Galina Ulanova (1910-1998) is considered to have been
one of the greatest dancers of the 20th century.
Here she is with Yury Zhdanov in 'Romeo And Juliet'.
RIA Novosti archive, image #11591 / Umnov / CC-BY-SA 3.0
[CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Marina Veznovets in 'Scheherazade' (2011)
by Gruszecki (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

You could say this is realism. You could say - many teachers do - that it is not kind to let girls imagine their body shape is fine, when it will in fact bar them from getting professional work. This is true. But the pictures above show that (a) it doesn't have to be this way and (b) the situation has been getting worse. 

The second thing that bothers me about the idea that dancers have to be ultra-thin and, as Gillian Lynne said, “there’s nothing wrong with it” is that this fixation on ultra-thinness in the ballet world is not, of course, an isolated phenomenon. There is – culture-wide – a rejection of the female body in its natural form. Thinness is in. If you aren’t thin, too often you are made to feel you can’t be beautiful (or even acceptable). With ballet on this same bandwagon, does this mean you can’t be graceful either? Not everyone is built to be a classical ballet dancer – fair enough. But what message does the current ideal give to our children about dance, about grace, about the possibility of enjoying movement? Movement can be joyful, liberating, confidence-bestowing – our bodies should be our friends. You only have to watch a toddler dancing to know how natural and vital it is to take pleasure in movement. The vogue for ultra-thin dancers, as well as for ultra-thin models and actresses, alienates girls from their bodies and makes their flesh – their very matter – the enemy. Take a longer historical perspective, and you can see that it was not ever thus. But, oh, what a shame!

Etching of Anna Pavlova (1881-1931) by Ernst Oppler

[Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons

Isadora Duncan (1878-1927)

Photograph by Arnold Genthe

Library of Congress, [Public Domain] via Wikimedia Commons

'Two Dancers Entering the Stage' by Edgar Degas (1834-1917) 

Harvard Art Museum/Fogg Museum

 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Ancient Greek funerary stele of a female dancer

Museo archeologico regionale, Palermo

Photograph by Giovanni Dall'Orto (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

(N.B. I would like to make clear that in the discussion above, and the photographs chosen, I am in no way criticising individual present-day dancers - I am only trying to demonstrate the general point.)