True Nutcracker Stories from A Nutcracker Museum
Ballet teachers are great story tellers. It's not unusual for a teacher to stop class and tell a tale about a fellow dancer, teacher or performance that explains why ballet is so important to them. They instinctually pass along the traditions of ballet to future dancers who might someday tell stories of their own.
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"The Night the Lights Went Out in Wheeling" One year our Nutcracker guest artist was a dancer from Puerto Rico. The dressing room was so cold that he refused to change clothes and go on stage unless we brought him a heater. The stage hands found one and plugged it in. The electricity for an entire city block went out and the show was postponed until later that evening when the electric company repaired the damage.
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The stories come out of the teacher's many years of collecting experiences and mementos that symbolize their dedication and sacrifice to the art. The stories are meant to alert young students to the choices and chances they will encounter if they pursue ballet as a livelihood. The teacher's stories are actually verbal accounts of dreams come true and lessons learned in the studio and on the stage.
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"Campus Police End Nutcracker Run" We had to discontinue productions on a particular college campus because for three years in a row the campus police would ticket almost everyone in the cast for driving over the speed limit.
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Each ballet teacher has his or her own method for collecting and remembering their personal life stories in dance. Dancers are famous for hoarding boxes of old pointe shoes, dried pink roses and programs. For my mother, Norma Gunter, the way to the memories is through a massive Nutcracker collection. At age 72, she has witnessed, and sometimes survived, many colorful Nutcracker seasons. Her history as a dance teacher is vast and certainly includes much more than the last 46 years of producing The Nutcracker (the first in 1959,) but it's this one habitual ritual she has embraced as an outward expression of her passion for ballet.
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"Where is Aurora?" We were two hours from home and it was time to start the morning show for the school children and the boy playing 'Fritz' hadn't shown up. Apparently he didn't get his homework done and his Dad wouldn't allow him to come to the show, but they didn't bother to call us. Seven year-old Aurora Held was in the show as a young party guest but she also knew the part of 'Fritz' from watching rehearsals. The choreographer (Suzy Gunter) dived into the props and costume boxes and dressed Aurora as 'Fritz.' No one in the audience realized it was a little girl playing the part, not even her own father recognized her. When he came backstage to pick her up, he walked right by asking, "Where's Aurora? I didn't see her on stage."
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Born during the Great Depression, Mom began dance lessons with the local teacher, Emma Beard, in the coal mining town of Beckley, WV. From beginnings as a tap dancer, Mrs. Beard introduced Norma Jean to the spellbinding world of ballet. She trained in New York then came home to raise a family. Three daughters and a son literally grew up in the Gunter Schools of Dance. Wherever Dad's job transferred us to throughout the state, Mom opened a studio.
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"Well meaning theatre manager causes props trouble" Every time the props master would put the Nutcracker props out on the table for the show, an overly helpful theatre manager would put them back into the storage box. When the dancers went for their props during a show, nothing was there.
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Each community had its preference for the kind of dance they wanted to learn (baton twirling was the most interesting obsession of one small river town outside of Charleston, WV,) but regardless of the requests, every student in our schools was required to take a ballet class. Tap and ballet, acrobatics and ballet, or baton twirling and ballet; no one left our studios without some exposure to the grace of ballet. My mother staunchly defended ballet as the foundation of all dance and almost never took a student who wouldn't enroll in a ballet class. She started a dance company in the early seventies to showcase her conviction that ballet was the heart of it all.
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"Attack of the Wasps!" The stage hands dislodged a wasp nest while setting up the costume trunks for a show in Ohio. When one dancer dashed backstage to put on her mouse costume for the battle scene she immediately felt a prickly sensation all over her body. When she asked the costume mistress to see what the problem was, several wasps flew out of the neck of the costume. The dancer missed the battle scene while first aid was administered to nine wasp stings on her body.
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This was before the regional ballet movement of the early 1980's. As arts funding tightened up during the Ronald Reagan years, ballet dancers from major companies on both coasts raced like pioneering land grabbers into the belly of the country to open schools and companies of their own. Without work in the cities any longer and without the massive touring dollars being spent, dancers had to find other venues for their tendus.
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"Clara Assaults Fritz On Stage" The Nutcracker doll used in the show is specially designed so that his head will "come off" while Fritz and Clara pull in opposite directions. One morning, the arm broke off. The stage manager repaired the arm by putting a long screw into the side to hold it in place. The screw he used was much too long and it secured the head in place as well. The next time Clara (Kitri Held) and Fritz fought over the Nutcracker, they circled and circled and pulled and pulled but it wouldn't come apart. Drosselmeier finally came on stage and took the doll away!
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At this point Mom incorporated as a non-profit regional ballet company. I applied for local grant monies to support an arts-in-education effort. My younger sister wrote a study guide for teachers to use in accordance with our first tour and my youngest sister designed and constructed the costumes. My young brother hand carved an intricate memento for my mother to remember the show by. It was a Nutcracker.
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"Skate Key, Anybody?" One school performance we arrived for was in the newly acquired gymnasium next door which was actually an old roller skating rink. That was the first 'Nutcracker in the round' we've ever done. The 'dressing room' was lined with shelves of stinky roller skates and several old washing machines and dryers. We spread our costumes out on the appliances.
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That's how it started. Mom doesn't ask for Nutcrackers, she attracts them. Students, parents and family members have showered her with a massive collection of traditional Nutcrackers and items depicting the favorite red clad, grim faced guardian of young Clara's dreams. One thousand Nutcrackers later, Mom has a "museum" in the studio simply because there isn't enough room at home to display everything!
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"Janet Jackson Has Nothing On These Costume Malfunctions" At one school performance, a boy shouted, "Oh, no! That boy's out there in his underwear!" Several mice and a Nutcracker Prince have battled with their masks and hoods on backwards, and one of our Arabian dancers broke a strap during the particularly acrobatic choreography and shared a very personal moment with the audience.
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The Nutcracker collection is evidence of a ballet teacher's dedication and devotion to a story that many think has gone stale and is way "overdone." In her 2003 book Nutcracker Nation, dance scholar Jennifer Fisher quotes dance critic Richard Buckle when he wrote, we are all "one more Nutcracker closer to death." A weary comment to be sure, but Mom never tires of the preparation, the productions or the perils that can befall even the best prepared shows.
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"Dressing Room Flood Challenges Dancers" The dressing rooms in the basement of an old vaudeville theatre in West Virginia flooded while we were on stage dancing Act 1. When everyone ran downstairs to change costumes, there was two inches of water on the floors. Some dancers couldn't change costumes for the Land of the Sweets and performed in their Act 1 costumes.
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The collection serves as a perpetual reminder of the funny and not so funny stories she has amassed over the years. Each hairy chin in the museum guards a moment within it's wooden chest that we share with each other when we need a good reason why we are still sending Nutcracker energy out into the universe. I have read and heard and studied the critic's rationales and theories for why The Nutcracker continues to evoke audiences and companies everywhere to "suffer" another Nutcracker. But when we look at Mom's collection and retell all the dramas, romance and tall tales surrounding past productions, we realize that doing Nutcracker is just plain family fun for everyone on and off the stage, because once you've done The Nutcracker, you're part of the family story.