Only Marie and her uncle Drosselmeier are witness to this shifting of reality. During this scene, the party has cleared, and Marie’s parents have gone to bed. Here, stage direction often dictates that the Christmas tree and grandfather clock grow, dwarfing Marie as the mice prepare for battle. In the ballet, after the party comes the dream scene, where Marie wakes from her slumber to check on her beloved, wounded Nutcracker doll.
But Drosselmeier sees Marie differently: he is struck by the way that she associates her visions and imaginings with the world around her and how she combines them to enrich her daily existence. Hoffman positions Marie as the learner, who grasps that she must use her imagination to see the world as it really is … From the point of view of Marie’s parents and her brother, Fritz, and sister Luise, she is delirious and talks nonsense. I was struck by Zipes’s depiction of the story’s young heroine, Clara/Marie: Never in my Nutcracker-saturated years had I actually read Hoffmann’s tale “The Nutcracker and The Mouse King.” I dug into the Penguin Classics edition of Nutcracker and Mouse King and The Tale of the Nutcracker, which contains both Hoffmann’s 1816 original and Alexandre Dumas’s 1845 retelling and features an introduction by German scholar Jack Zipes. (Except for the fact that my sister danced the role of Mouse Queen, which meant that the usual rodent-patriarchal-monarchy had been supplanted by a woman). It seemed that Hoffmann’s tale had nothing to with 2016, and that issued a challenge. Last week, I traveled to Boston to watch my sister perform in her nineteenth year of Nutcracker, and the next day we sat in the Massachusetts State House, watching the state’s electors vote for Hillary Clinton. Recently I joke tweeted “What The Nutcracker’s Battle With the Rat King Taught Us About Trump Resistance,” as if I were writing that piece. It’s become my grown-up tradition to look back in snark ( “How the Nutcracker Wrecked My Christmas” ) or with sincerity ( “To All The Young Women Never Cast As Clara” ).
Now, a decade out from my dancing career, I’ve carried The Nutcracker into my writing life. If we were too busy for Christmas, at least we were reconstituted on the stage as a family, having Christmas as a nineteenth century German family. My mother and father often played parents in the party scene-why not participate when waiting on daughters at rehearsal?-which put Nutcracker at the center of our holiday season. I’ve portrayed a jester, an orchid, a horse, and a cavalry-on-a-felt-horse, all to bring E.T.A Hoffmann’s tale to life again and again. I’ve aided King Rat as a mouse, waltzed as a flower, and pulled my actual sister’s hair as a wig-clad lad in the party scene.
Between the ages of eight and eighteen, I danced in over one hundred performances of The Nutcracker.
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