The rest of us may not have quite skipped over Thanksgiving yet, but the girls at the Alabama Ballet are already practicing for the Christmas season because you know the Nutcracker is coming. And not just any old nutcracker but specifically the one choreographed by the incredible George Balanchine. As an intellectual property lawyer, I am impressed by the way they use a TM symbol on everything, to show the trademark registration has been applied for. That was a little slow incoming since this will be the tenth time it has played at the Alabama Ballet. And Balanchine, born Giorgi Balanchivadze, died back in 1983. If the registration were already granted you would see that R in a circle.
When I was in college, before learning so many nifty things in law school, I used to take the 45-minute train to the city to go and see my favorite ballerina from Birmingham who was in dancing school at the American Ballet Theatre. But we would catch some performances of at the New York City Ballet that Balanchine founded and directed in his day. Even too my unpracticed eye for dancers, the movements of Balanchine’s choreography were always both surprising and beautiful.
In 1954, Balanchine created his version of The Nutcracker, in which he played the mime role of Drosselmeyer. The company has since performed the ballet every year in New York City.
The other thing that strikes me again watching the rehearsals is how hard the girls work. They hit the floor hard and in the rehearsal room you can hear the pounding and see that they risk doing real damage. I remember my ballerina friend always having pulled hamstrings and surgery for bone spurs. It was a lot like playing in the SEC.
What you also see at the rehearsals that doesn’t show in the performance is the girls falling down on their backs with their little hearts palpitating and their chests heaving after a particularly strenuous pas de deux.
Of course they don’t break a sweat in Billy Brown’s graceful photos of the actual performances.
Balanchine’s trademarked Nutcracker will open December 9 and runs through the 18th at the Wright Center at Samford. The Alabama Ballet is only one of seven licensed to dance by the Balanchine Trust to dance Giorgi’s version. Even the props have to meet the New York City Ballet’s specifications. Balanchine himself had such strict standards that he insisted on forming his own school for ballet to train his own dancers. He carried such weight that the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center was designed by architect Philip Johnson but to Balanchine’s specifications. Of course the show comes with the sumptuous score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who died in 1893 so his copyright has expired, unfortunately for his heirs.
The ballet premiered in St. Petersburg in 1892 where it was not a success.
(See Van Gogh, Vincent). But a 20-minute suite the composer extracted as a musical score before his death was a hit and kept the Nutcracker alive until it was revived mid-century in U.S. Christmastime performances. Note the unusual instrumentation with the use of the celesta in the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies. That will help you maintain the illusion that the dancers are simply floating and not working.
