Halfway through Nutcracker Rouge, the dancers disappeared. The lights came on. A security guard materialized from the haze of incense and pulled an unconscious girl from the front row. Her head bobbed as he carried her up the aisle and out of sight. When the lights stayed on, people headed to the bar to buy drinks from a man in a shiny gold thong.
The theater was in Bushwick, so all the stalls were for everyone all at once. My brother-in-law had been next to the dreamless girl in the bathroom. One stall over. Trying to finish his business. The dreamless girl’s foot slipped under his stall as she fell. He heard a struggle, self against self against public toilet. The heel scraped out of sight when a friend yanked helped the dreamless girl back up. His business, on pause, progressed in peace.
The lights dimmed again. The curtain shimmied. Performers in speedos and pasties and glitter mimed mass copulation to Christmas music. The dreamless girl did not return. The show, as they say, must go on. What, I wondered, was going on in the first place? And what made it worth seeing?
Sublime Economics
The Nutcracker is a Christmas classic and a Christmas moneymaker. Most people who don’t regularly see ballet have still seen it. That’s why ballet companies make an estimated 40% of annual ticket revenues from Nutcracker performances. I still have a vivid memory of being taken to a performance in Boston when I was in fifth grade. Most of the memory is of pain and suffering in the face of immense boredom, squinting at tiny figures far below.
I didn’t bother to use this memory as a baseline impression for all future Nutcracker performances. Instead, I looked for reasons to be snooty about Nutcracker Rouge. I’m not proud of it. But also I couldn’t help it. A certain snootiness is to be expected when a new performance of an old classic seems to only be updating it to something more raunchy, for the sake of raunchiness. It would be an easy job to judge Nutcracker Rouge as a monstrously pointless perversion of The Nutcracker, I thought with satisfaction as bethonged dancers came to the stage.
Little did I know that the plot and the performance of the unperverted Nutcracker also made no sense. It was more Narnia than Shakespeare, and more Disneyland than poetry. The art was more motion than meaning. The plot was dumb by default, which meant there was nothing to corrupt in the first place. To my surprise, I learned Nutcracker Rouge follows the original pretty carefully. And my snootiness had nowhere to go.
The Nutcracker debuted in St. Petersburg in December 1892. The ballet goes like this: A family is celebrating Christmas Eve. There’s a knock on the door and a toymaker named Drosselmeyer arrives. He gives the children a wooden nutcracker doll. The daughter sneaks downstairs when the family is asleep to play with it. The clock strikes midnight. The Christmas tree grows higher and higher. The nutcracker grows to the size of a man. A war breaks out. On one side, there are gingerbread men, tin soldiers, and dolls. On the other side, there’s mice led by the seven-headed Mouse King.
The toys beat the mice. It’s a huge deal. The nutcracker turns into a prince and takes Clara to the Land of Sweets. They gorge on desserts from around the world while flutes are played. The Sugar Plum Fairy, who has been ruling the kingdom in the absence of the nutcracker prince, takes Clara and the prince to a sleigh and they ride off together. It’s the story of a Christmas miracle and dreams coming true. If you squint hard enough.
The dancers from Nutcracker Rouge have fewer clothes, but the tension and action and sequence of the production is similar. There’s one key difference: the protagonist is a young woman, not a girl. According to Timeout:
She’s on a grown-up voyage of erotic self-discovery, punctuated by striptease and acrobatic artistry.
“What [designer Zane Pihlström] and I try to do is create a dream world,” choreographer Austin McCormick explains. “And The Nutcracker obviously lends itself to that.”
Watching Nutcracker Rouge on a Sunday afternoon in Bushwick, I was a lot less bored by this dream world than last time. But between flurries of hairless butts and foam genitals, I still tried to be snooty about the banality of it. Sense and sensibility has long ago been subverted long ago. Why make a perverse ballet based on an holiday classic in the first place?
McCormick, a founder of Company XIV, the theater company and owner of Theater XIV behind Nutcracker Rouge, has an answer.
When I started my company, I wanted to have that party atmosphere. I wanted it to feel like a fun event that people would look forward to and enjoy, and less like an artistic burden.
This is what imploded my snootiness. I set out to judge the worth of art by symbolism, not sensation, to justify turning my nose. But in the party art genre of Nutcracker Rouge, I realized the madness was the meaning. A madness so manic the audience becomes lusciously lost to the dream of it. Maybe the dreamless girl had the most artistic experience of Nutcracker Rouge of all.
Putting the “art” back in party frees the form from the very thing that cripples creativity: self-consciousness. It’s the self-consciousness that McCormick is talking about when he talks about the “artistic burden.” If you decide that the meaning of art above all else is to give people joy, to give them a party, then you free art from the burden of having to mean something, instead of letting it just be something.
After the dreamless girl was carried out, the show went on. The toymaker tossed off his robe and started to club the dancers with a four-foot foam phallis. Within the spectacle, it was impossible to think about anything else. Art and audience became one within the party of it all. And when the audience spilled onto the painted streets of Bushwick, they walked with a daze into the December dusk. The party, like all parties and like all dreams, was over.
Nutcracker Rouge shows that if art can be a party, the basic economic unit of the sublime is not beauty or wisdom but awe. Awe is that feeling we get in the back of our skull when we connect with something beyond ourselves. Awe is an involuntary impulse. Awe is electric. And rediscovering awe in art beneath the burden of meaning is a Christmas miracle.
This is a beautiful post. Now, more than ever, we need art and live performances to help us get out of our own heads and connect more viscerally with our senses, whether through comedy, music, theater, or viewing art that plays with what we believe is "true" and delivers a new perspective.
Susan Sontag reached on a similar conclusion around similar subject matter with "Notes on 'Camp'" - worth a read, if you're into the topic, and want some more lenses to study it through