Day in the Life: Love, Loathing, and the Sugar Plum Fairy
Checking in on this season’s tiny dancers by
The Mouse King. The Snow Queen. Drosselmeyer. Clara. The Land of Sweets. The Waltz of Flowers. “The Nutcracker is a Russian ballet,” Gisele Genschow is saying, “but it’s an American thing. It’s not performed much in Europe.”
Genschow, director of the nonprofit School of Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, is discussing this odd Christmas phenomenon in her office off St. Michael’s Drive, a few feet from the studio where she’s training the newest generation of mice and candy canes. Here in America, she notes, the beloved Sugar Plum Fairy and all the other denizens of Nutcrackerworld pirouette across the country every December, to the kneeling-on-their-seats delight of hundreds of thousands of children. “I don’t think there’s a dance company in the country, professional or amateur, that doesn’t do it,” Genschow says.
The director has seen both sides of this curious dichotomy. Growing up in Germany, studying ballet, dancing professionally across the Continent, she never once appeared in The Nutcracker. But since emigrating to America she has ushered young dancers into Nutcrackerland in Miami, Pittsburgh, and Fort Worth before coming to Santa Fe in 1992 to head the Santa Fe Dance Foundation, now the School of ASFB. This year the company’s annual Nutcracker, a joint production of the professional company and the school, will be resurrected at the Lensic Theater on December 12 and 13—you can set your grandfather clock by it.
“It’s the only ballet many adults ever see, because they take their children,” Genschow says. “It’s magical.”
Anyone who has ever taken a child to see The Nutcracker will long remember their enraptured faces, their glowing eyes, as they long to one day be Clara, the 12-year-old girl onstage whose Christmas Eve dream constitutes the second act. Or to be the handsome Nutcracker who turns into a prince. Or become a brave toy soldier. Or to bathe in the dazzling beauty of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Kids tend to talk about the ballet—perhaps even dream about it—for days afterward, or weeks.
It is also true, however, that just as there are bad guys (or bad mice) in the ballet, there are also meanies in the adult world. Critics do not consider Nutcracker a great ballet, not in the league of Swan Lake or Sleeping Beauty. Many professional dancers will admit that they loathe performing The Nutcracker year after year—after year—after year. They much prefer contemporary ballet, which stretches their limbs and their minds in new and exciting ways. By far the most cynical and oft-copied comment about the ballet appeared in a 1972 review by dance critic Richard Buckle, who wrote, “Well, we are one more Nutcracker nearer death.” But don’t quote that to the children.
Glancing at her watch, Genschow—pert, lively, red-haired—slips into a dressing room, then emerges in black leotards under a short, flowered skirt. Lean and limber, looking as if she could perform the Snow Queen this very day, she enters the dance studio, where half a dozen nine-year-olds dressed in turquoise leotards await. Genschow puts music on a stereo and moves among the girls, offering instruction in her mellifluous German accent, smiling approval, hiding a frown, straightening a leg here, a tummy there, an ankle down the line, as if she were preparing ballerinas for their Lincoln Center debuts.
When the hourlong class is over, one of the students, Adriana Sanchez, runs out into the corridor and hugs her father, Patrick, who has been watching through an inner window. “Last year I was a candy cane,” she informs a visitor excitedly. Her dad feels blessed by the hug. For a while last year he had to do without, after an infection led to the amputation of his left leg. A prosthetic limb of cloth and metal is visible as he watches the dancers. “After the amputation,” he says, “it took a while for her to accept that I’m still the same daddy.”
In the studio, a large room with a gray floor, beige walls, fluorescent lights—and Nutcracker posters on the walls—Genschow is now teaching more advanced 11- and 12-year-olds. At this level each girl can choose her own color leotard. “My sister is the one in brown,” Alyssa Robinson, 15, says, watching from a small adjacent lounge, homework in her lap, as Genschow puts the dancers through their turns. Alyssa was a mouse in The Nutcracker three years ago. She changed dance schools for a time but now is back, because “Ms. Genschow is one of the best teachers.”
Does she hope this year to perform Clara, the lead student role in the ballet? “I would like. . . I mean, I don’t really hope. . . we’ll just see what happens,” she says. At five feet one and a half inches, she wonders if she is still short enough.
Peeling off warm-up pants, revealing a green leotard, Alyssa stands in front of a mirror, combs her long brown hair, grabs fistfuls of locks, and twirls them into a bun at the back of her head, fixing a net over the bun. She’s been studying ballet since she was three. She’s been able to put up her own hair, she recalls, scrunching her face to remember that far back, since she was eight.
In the studio, Genschow and the 12-year-olds are still working. One of them, Hanna Bass, ducks out early; she’s in the next class as well and has to change from ballet slippers to pointe shoes. Slim, graceful, blond, Hanna last year was one of two Claras, which the company alternates. Would she like to be Clara again this year? “Yes . . . Well, I don’t exactly hope . . . We’ll have to see what happens.”
What happens, when it’s the day for auditions, is that Genschow is joined by ASFB’s artistic director, Tom Mossbrucker, to make the choices. Informing those girls not selected is the hard part.
“They’re learning to be professionals,” Genschow says. “After professionals audition, the director posts a list on the wall. Most of the time you’re not on it. Here we do talk to the girls. Explain the reason. Maybe they have grown too tall.”
Genschow is exhausted from the afternoon’s first two classes, demonstrating, correcting, adjusting, encouraging—“Yes! Yes! Yes!”—and there is still a 90-minute session to go. It’s been a long day, beginning with yoga to keep her own body in shape. Soon, after pointe class, as the sky outside darkens, she will go home to a glass of wine. Maybe watch a rented movie. “Foreign,” she sighs, smiling. “French, perhaps.”
