Last Sunday, alongside my colleague, Globe theatre critic J. Kelly Nestruck, I made my Nutcracker debut with the National Ballet of Canada.
We wore motley jester costumes adorned with fuzzy pompoms and floppy nightcaps lined with yellow rag-doll hair. In front of 2,000-odd people, I used emphatic kicks and arm gestures to rally the cannon master to go heavy on the gunpowder and fire his cannon with abandon. I would describe the style of my kicks as belonging to an uncertain martial-arts influence – I couldn't tell you where this inspiration came from.
You wonder, in these strange interludes of life, how you came to agree to such self-inflicted humiliation. The experience was also, admittedly, what the kids would call a lot of fun.
But if you had told me 20 years ago that my first appearance with a professional ballet company wouldn't be in tights and pointe shoes but would have me dressed, instead, like an unhinged, androgynous clown, I wouldn't have believed you.
At 14, my life possessed a dazzling simplicity because it orbited a single, steadfast goal. I was going to make it as a professional ballerina. And with this goal, the earthly worries of a teenager were blasted into dust. Trouble with friends, school, boys, could be shrugged off in light of the all-consuming purpose that lay claim on my body and most of my time.
I'm sure I'm not the first young dancer who'd thought she'd solved the problem of an existential universe. I knew exactly what I wanted from life – and so life overflowed with meaning.
Like many young dancers, my first exposure to ballet came via a matinee of The Nutcracker. This would have been in the mid-1980s, the Sony Centre was still called the O'Keefe Centre and Karen Kain was the company star. What I remember, above all else, was being unable to reconcile the startling, almost unjustifiable, beauty on stage with the dreariness of the December day that contained it.
When I turned to my mother after the show and explained that I needed to start training immediately (I was four), my decision was less dreamy aspiration than a bit of quick realpolitik. I understood, suddenly, that two worlds existed – one full of the ordinary indignities of snowsuits and kindergarten, and another in which gorgeous human specimens soared to heights of unspeakable splendour. The choice wasn't hard.
As a dance critic, I'm very invested in thinking of ballet as a relevant, dynamic art form, able to hold a good conversation with the 21st century. It goes without saying that The Nutcracker, which premiered in 1892 and has been produced regularly across the Western world for more than half a century, may not be entirely up to the task. It's a crowd pleaser that functions as if it were a Christmas-season franchise; no matter where you see it, you can depend upon giant sets, dancing animals and hordes of adorable underage performers.
The Nutcracker generates a huge portion of annual ticket revenue (as much as 40 per cent) for big North American companies. It exists in numerous versions of varying quality. Reviewing the premiere of George Balanchine's adaptation at the New York City Ballet, New York Times critic John Martin complained the work felt vacuous and dated. That was 61 years ago.
But a part of me loves The Nutcracker anyway – especially one as visually ornate and choreographically dense as the National Ballet's version by James Kudelka. Accept it as artifact, not art, and you're likely to find yourself transported, even if you're as shamelessly serious in your tastes as I am.
For me, Tchaikovsky's lush score is instant sensory trigger of so many vivid memories. In my early days as a ballet student, I spent hours in my family's basement choreographing to the Arabian "Coffee" Dance from Act 2, a haunting piece of music known for an eerily suspended note on the clarinet.
At 13, I performed on pointe in my first real tutu (a rite of passage for any ballerina) to Waltz of the Flowers. A year later, I sat with my ballet peers and watched enviously as the older star of our ensemble rehearsed the Nutcracker Grand Pas de Deux, a piece of music I still find inconceivably rich and emotional. At that point, I was in high school and needed to get into a full-time preprofessional academy. I spent that summer at the National Ballet School. When the summer ended, I wasn't asked back.
Walking backstage in our floppy clown garb, Nestruck and I found ourselves in the midst of an organized chaos of towering set pieces, crew members, aristocrats and child-sized mice. But my attention was pulled to a snow maiden testing her pointe shoes in the wings, another having the many hooks of her shimmering tutu fastened by a wardrobe assistant. I recognized the focus in these dancers' demeanours, the sense that all that mattered was the time they were about to spend on stage. It was this glimpse into that private, meaningful insulation that made me long, more than anything, for the life I used to know.
We were introduced to corps dancer Christopher Gerty, a sight to behold as cannon master, with his long grey beard and high, red egg-shaped hat. I told him I might try to enliven my performance by throwing in the odd pirouette. He encouraged me to give it all I had.
So, I gave it five minutes of manic, ironically exaggerated ballet moves. Nestruck provided a much-needed counterpoint with a more demure, understated interpretation. When we were back in the wings, Gerty commented kindly on my wide array of steps. "I think you would have made it as a dancer, y'know?" I will choose to believe he wasn't joking.
Several months after my National Ballet School rejection, I stopped dancing. For a long time, I couldn't watch, or even really think about, ballet. People compare this kind of heartbreak to the loss of a great love, but I'm not sure that's the right comparison.
Ballet is loved more selfishly, and I mean that in a good way. It depends on total, even irrational, self-reliance, and this makes the devotion so absolute and exhilarating, that to lose it feels like a direct loss of self.
Once I'd changed back into my street clothes, the publicist asked me if I'd be game to perform again the following year. In my post-show breathlessness and, no doubt, confusion, I told him he could count me in.
But as I sat in the audience and watched the insanely talented company throw themselves into Act 2, I felt very silly, very small. I realized my Cannon Doll role would not be slated for a reprise. I need to stay seated in the audience, watching avidly, writing things down.
Martha Schabas