Dance and Film Reviews: The Criticulture Guide to Holiday Entertainment

The Nutcracker

Music by Peter Tchaikovsky

Choreography by George Balanchine

New York City Ballet

Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, Manhattan

December 16, 2018

Ballets Trocadero de Monte Carlo

Joyce Theater, Manhattan

December 30, 2018

Capernaum (Chaos)

Written and Directed by Nadine Labaki

What makes good holiday entertainment? Well, some upbeat stuff, warmth, and a happy ending help. A few tears are excellent. But a little depth and intellectual stimulation, at least for this critic, make these emotions even more poignant.

For example, Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker is a US holiday staple, a feel-good treat like It’s a Wonderful Life, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Chinese take-out food, and Messiah. But it was not always so. The ballet was rarely performed before the 1950s, always in the shadow of Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty, in spite of its superior score, perhaps the best thing Tchaikovsky ever wrote. All that change after the masterful George Balanchine, Russian dancer recently settled in the US, choreographed it for the nascent NY City Ballet in 1954. It was an instant hit, and established the precedent for holiday performances ever since, now increasingly emulated in other parts of the world. It’s not clear why the piece would have been so neglected. Perhaps because there is relatively little to do for a star ballerina (the Sugar Plum Fairy has only a single pas de deux). In fact, adult dancers are featured in only about half of it. Of course, that means that the myriad of kids on stage get to strut their stuff, which makes many families in the audience happy. For an adult, there is some fun complexity here. Based on an ETA Hoffman story, there is some excellent Freudian symbolism here, as a young pre-pubescent couple (sort of) falls in love, a phallic Christmas tree grows to gigantic proportions, and an attentive older man seems to surround himself with children. But the excellence of this ballet rests on the magnificent score, here well played by the NYCB orchestra, the famous Act 2 character dances, and the upbeat message of children soaring off into the distance (here on an aerial Santa-like sleigh). Somehow, I had never before seen the Balanchine production, and I loved it. There is great simplicity and economy here. He lets the music shine through, and his steps always illuminate the score. He also adds very little extra stage business, e.g. letting the Mouse-Soldier battle proceed without too many gimmicks. It all felt much crisper than other overstuffed Nutcrackers that feel like the cook added a few too many things to the plum pudding and overwhelmed the basic taste. For once, the magnificent ending waltz (the best, and least appreciated piece in the ballet)felt truly climactic, with typically excellent Balanchine mass choreography involving all the Act 2 participants, launching the exit sleigh with real momentum. 

Some of the sets and costumes look ready for a re-do as their colors seem a bit faded, but this NYC tradition remains in good hands, with excellent dancing and acting from kids and adults alike.

An equally fun tradition was the annual visit of the Ballets Trocadero de Monaco, the all-male ballet troupe that has done cross-dressing sendups of ballet classics since its founding in the Village of NYC in the mid-70s. I have seen a lot of good ballet since I last saw this talented group, and what was remarkable (besides the mugging and campy humor) was the quality of the dancing. Their jokes work because you can often just sit there and admire high quality corps de ballet and solo dancing as if it were a “real” performance, forgetting that it is men up there on point shoes executing fouettés. This makes it all the more funny when, during a perfectly executed ensemble move, they insert a Greta Garbo-like over the shoulder come-on, in perfect unison as if it were a classical ballet position. The program began with “Chopeniana” (sic), a parody of Fokine’s Les Sylphides (1892), considered the first truly abstract ballet (i.e. without a plot), and set to Chopin’s music orchestrated by Glazunov. This ballet is ripe for parody, since it goes a little overboard with frail white-clad ballerinas waving their arms like stands of wheat, framing classical ballet steps in the tradition of Giselle. 

The single male dancer “the poet-dreamer” here was overtly stoned, led about the stage and cued by his pissed-off partners. Magnificent here was the statuesque Nina Immobilashvili (Alberto Preto) and the stunningly virtuosic Varvara Laptopova (Takaomi Yoshino). The latter was not a funny as the others, but provided a standard of superb dancing that would have been admired by any female soloist. The second piece was a sendup of the classic Balanchine ballet Stars and Stripes (1958) set to music of Sousa. Balanchine ballets often begin with a fast curtain revealing a perfect geometric array of clone-like ballerinas in a characteristic pose, setting off stunning precise group choreography (as seen in the “real thing” here, fusing ballet with military precision). In the Trock performance I laughed out loud, as the opening curtain instead revealed unprepared ballerinas (one smoking, one without appropriate attire) slouching as if on break. The innovative Balanchine baton work was done with surprisingly little camp (some anxious baton twirlers; no batons were dropped, but one was used suggestively). Great fun, and well-done parody that left the crowd (and me) in a fine mood.

The Cannes Jury Prize for 2018 went to the Lebanese film Capernaum (tr. “Chaos”), which most would not qualify as a holiday film, given its grim, gritty reality filmed in the streets of Beirut. It follows the street kid Zain, played by a remarkable actor, a real Beirut street kid and Syrian refugee, the 12 year old Zain Al Rafeea. Like all the film’s actors he was recruited from the streets, and is not a professional. This angelic-appearing young actor was illiterate when recruited. 

He later got an entry visa to Norway, where he now is going to school for the first time in his life. So in this case real life closely follows the film, where Zain is desperate to get out of the violence of Beirut. The film focuses on how Zain tries to care for both himself and a baby who has fallen into his care. Director Nadine Labaki’s relentless camera documents the mean streets, abusive parents and societal oppression that stand in Zain’s way. The utter reality of it all is stunning, enhanced by lots of hand-held cameras down low at child level, adeptly showing Zain’s isolation. The gritty reality, use of real people as actors and an angelic young lead reminded me of a similar award-winning film Pixote (1981) filmed with street kid-actors from the slums of Sao Paolo (below).



The really remarkable thing about Capernaum is that after such a grueling 2-hour film, the director manages to achieve a fantastic, non-contrived happy ending with a simple two second camera shot, and this coup de theatre makes you leave the theater happy and reassured, and in a truly holiday spirit. Sometimes a film and a good director can create instant magic, and this was one of those times! See this film if you can.