A Christmas without ‘Nutcracker’

What does American ballet look like without this cultural touchstone — which is also an essential source of revenue?

Hello, good readers —

It’s only June, but the writing is on the wall for so many of the things we had planned for the end of this year. For some of us that means weddings, or family reunions, or any number of joyful acts of gathering and community and celebration. For the ballet world, it means The Nutcracker.

Yesterday, New York City Ballet announced that it has canceled its 47-show run of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker, which has become an annual tradition since it was first performed in 1954. A few days ago, The Joffrey Ballet canceled its Nutcracker, too. More companies and schools will no doubt follow.

As any ballet parent knows, The Nutcracker is a community affair. It’s usually the biggest performance on a ballet school or company’s calendar, in part because it takes the entire school or company, and often non-dancer extras, to put it on. Dance dads build sets and dance moms work as dressers in the wings. Some parents appear on stage, playing parents in the first act party scene.

At City Ballet, “The production includes [a] roster of more than 150 dancers and musicians, 40 stagehands and more than 125 students from the School of American Ballet; the children play the leads of Marie and the Prince, as well as excited partygoers...  The show — with its extra sets and scenery that moves on and off the stage — takes more people than usual to produce.”

There’s no way to rehearse that, or stage it, without violating social distancing guidelines. And that’s before you put patrons in the theater. 

The Nutcracker is also a community affair in that more members of the community — more patrons — come see The Nutcracker than any other ballet. Most Americans who have seen a ballet have seen one ballet, and it’s The Nutcracker. At City Ballet last year, Nutcracker ticket revenue accounted for almost 45% of all ticket sales, and at other companies, it’s even higher. Ballet companies cannot survive without the influx of cash that Nutcracker reliably brings in, and that other more contemporary or less crowd-pleasing productions do not.

But then, The Nutcracker has… shall we say, issues. There’s the “Chinese” Tea dance, which varies from version to version but still, in many companies, features yellowface makeup, shuffling steps, and cartoonish finger pointing. There’s also the “Arabian” Coffee variation, which is usually a ballet-ified version of whatever the choreographer thinks “Arabian” dancing looks like (it’s normally a lot of sultry wiggling and flattened, flexed hands). For years, The Nutcracker has put racist caricatures on stage, first calling them “art,” and then calling them “tradition.”

Phil Chan is co-founder of the Final Bow for Yellowface campaign, which has been pushing ballet companies do the right thing and eliminate offensive portrayals of Asian culture from their repertory, because it’s not just The Nutcracker, it’s La Bayadere, The Magic Flute other beloved ballets in the classical canon, too. And to be fair, many American companies have eliminated yellowface from their Nutcrackers, often with Final Bow’s help.

In his book, Final Bow for Yellowface: Dancing Between Intention and Impact, Phil writes about “Chinese” Tea:

I didn’t have a problem with Chinese-ness being portrayed on stage in little sweet candy vignettes, I just wanted to make sure that the portrayal was something authentic and positive from my culture. The coolie with his rice paddy hat, eye makeup extended to his ears, Fu Manchu mustache, and queue bobbing with every shuffle wasn’t exactly how I wanted my heritage to be portrayed. Every time I saw this dance, it felt like I was watching the schoolyard bullies who used to pull their eyes back to tease me.

And now, well...

It’s hard to imagine a better example of how the combination of COVID-19 and white ballet institutions’ failures to correct the racism of the Nutcracker has put them in a very, very tough position. (Before you email me to tell me that your local production of the Nutcracker isn’t racist, let me just say a) are you sure? And b) if that’s true, congratulations, but that is a very low bar).

As I was researching this book, so many people of color in the ballet world, especially professional dancers and teachers who used to be professional dancers, told me that unless ballet handles its racism problems (which go well beyond The Nutcracker), it will die.

They were right, and this is just one example of how right they were: ballet’s commitment to a “tradition” has made this economic catastrophe even harder to mitigate. Before, they had a choice: your current racist Nutcracker, or a new one that respects the cultures it depicts on stage.

The pandemic has taken that choice away — now, it’s a racist Nutcracker, or no Nutcracker at all. And it reveals just how many companies chose racism until it was no longer convenient.

Here’s what Chan told me when I interviewed him at the start of this year:

We’re not doing this to be politically correct. We’re sounding the alarm to the [ballet] community that if we don’t change, we will die. If audiences come to The Nutcracker and they’re having a good time and then all of a sudden, boom, they’re uncomfortable, we’ve lost them. We’ve lost them, and we’re turning away people. Not just Asian people, but people who say ‘I just don’t want to participate in this.’

That’s it from me. Thanks, as always, for reading. And if you want more of Phil’s work, check out his Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month interview series, “What’s the Tea?” He and his Final Bow co-founder New York City Ballet soloist Georgina Pazcoguin interviewed a different AAPI dancer each day, at a time when very few American ballet companies were acknowledging the month at all. Their conversation with Edwaard Liang, Ballet Met Artistic Director, is especially moving.

See you next week.