Audience Guide
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Audience Guide December 2 - 27, 20161 Teacher Resource Guide Terrence S. Orr’s Benedum Center for the Performing Arts December 2 - 27, 2016 Presenting Sponsors Student Matinee Sponsor The Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre Education Department is grateful for the support of the following Allegheny Regional Asset District Peoples Natural Gas Anne L. and George H. Clapp Charitable Trust Pennsylvania Council on the Arts BNY Mellon Foundation Pennsylvania Department of Community and Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation Economic Development Eat ‘n Park Hospitality Group PNC Bank Grow up Great ESB Bank PPG Industries, Inc. Giant Eagle Foundation Richard King Mellon Foundation The Grable Foundation James M. and Lucy K. Schoonmaker Hefren-Tillotson, Inc. Foundation The Heinz Endowments Edith L. Trees Charitable Trust Henry C. Frick Educational Fund of The Buhl UPMC Health Plan Foundation Highmark Foundation Jack Buncher Foundation Cover photo by Duane Rieder; Artist: William Moore. Production Guide created by PBT’s Department of Education and Community Engagement, 2016. 2 CONTENTS Page 4. About the Ballet 5. Double Bill: Iolanthe and The Nutcracker 5. Preserving the Choreography—Notation and The Nutcracker 7. Did You Know? Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King 7. Important Dates for The Nutcracker Ballet 8. Characteristics of a Story Ballet in the Late 19th Century 8. The Composer: Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky 9. A Nutcracker Innovation: The Celesta 10. Did You Know? Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker 10. Cast List and Setting for PBT’s The Nutcracker 11. Synopsis 12. The Pittsburgh Connection 14. The Choreography 16. Signature Steps—Piourette and Balancé 17. The Costumes 19. The Scenic Design 19. Getting to Know PBT’s Dancers 20. The Benedum Center 20. Accessibility 3 About the Ballet The Nutcracker ballet was created in 1892 in Russia, which at the time was ruled by a Czar. In the capitol, St. Petersburg, the famous Imperial Theatre School and the Mariinsky Theater were supported by the royal family. Respect for art and music was a highly regarded czarist tradition. The Imperial Theater regularly created music, opera and ballet programs for the entertainment of the Czar. The Theater’s director, I. A. Vsevolozhsky, decided to create a ballet based Original sketch for the set of The Nutcracker, Act II, 1892 on a rather dark story, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Written in 1816 by German Romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann, the story was widely known in Russia. It had been adapted in 1844 by French author Alexandre Dumas (author of The Three Musketeers), whose version is seen by some as a simpler, lighter and less frightening story. Marius Petipa, the ballet master at the Imperial School, was given the task of translating the story into ballet. Because he didn’t read German, he wasn’t familiar with Hoffmann’s book and instead used Dumas’ revision (Histoire d'un casse-noisette) as the basis for the ballet. Vsevolozhsky contracted with Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky to create the score. Petipa and Tchaikovsky had worked together on the very successful 1890 ballet The Sleeping Beauty. Petipa gave Tchaikovsky detailed musical notes, even down to the number of bars and the tempo. For the “Arabian Dance” (called “Coffee” in Petipa’s original) the choreographer’s instructions read: COFFEE. Arabia. The kingdom of Yemen. Coffee mocha. Oriental Dance. From 24 to 32 bars of charming and voluptuous music. When Petipa became ill, his assistant, Lev Ivanov, took over the project. There is still debate as to how much of the choreography was created by each. The Nutcracker premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre in December 1892, along with Tchaikovsky’s opera, Iolanta, which was performed first. (In France it was common to perform a ballet following an opera; Russia sometimes adopted this French tradition.) The audience and critical reaction to the ballet was mixed. Critics generally liked the “snow” scene but were annoyed with—among other things—the prominence of children in the ballet, the deviation from the original Hoffmann tale, and the fact that the showcase for the ballerina (the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”) didn’t occur until almost midnight (due to Original cast of The Nutcracker, 1892 Image source Iolanthe being staged first). The score was much better-received, and was recognized by most critics for its beauty and inspirational melodies. 4 The ballet wasn’t particularly popular in Russia and was performed only sporadically and in shortened versions for several decades. It was first performed in Great Britain in 1934 and was brought to the United States in 1944 (first performed by San Francisco Opera Ballet). George Balanchine’s 1954 version for New York City Ballet popularized the ballet, and it soon be- came a Christmas holiday tradition in the U.S. Today, hundreds of versions of the ballet are performed every year. Double Bill: Iolanthe and The Nutcracker Ballet and opera have a long, intertwined history. Opera came into development at almost the same time as ballet did in the mid-17th century, except in Italy. However, when opera migrated to France, the government rolled the production of both art forms together in the creation of the Royal Academy of Music (later the Paris Opera) in 1669. As French opera became more serious in tone and tragic in content over the latter part of that century, ballet bits or divertissements were thrown in as “leavening” to lighten the mood or would focus entirely on le merveilleux—the marvelous (think spectacle and grandeur). The Italians took a different route, and instead of meshing ballet within the story of the opera, they segregated them: ballets were independent spectacles performed in between the opera’s acts. Up until the mid-19th century, most opera companies had their own resident ballet companies at their disposal for mounting productions. What many don’t realize is that The Nutcracker actually started on a double-bill with Tchaikovsky’s opera, Iolanthe, a story about a blind princess who, when she finds true love, recovers the sight she never even realized was missing. Some scholars point out that this double-bill intentionally placed the darker story of Iolanthe before the more saccharine Nutcracker, something that would temper the music and nar- rative flaws of both pieces, but especially of The Nutcracker, which never captivated Tchaikovsky’s attention the way The Sleeping Beauty did and Medea Mei-Figner, originator of the role of Iolanthe. Image source whose story lacked the depth of the earlier work. The total length of the evening with both performances was over four hours, a far cry from PBT’s two hour version! Preserving the Choreography—Notation and The Nutcracker Have you ever played the childhood game “Telephone?” Where you whisper a phrase in someone’s ear, who passes along what she heard to the next person, and so on and so forth until you get to the end? Most of the time, what is at the end doesn’t sound much like the first phrase at all! For the most part, prior to video technology, this was how dance was passed down and taught—person to person, from people who danced in a production and relied on their memory to teach it to others. Occasionally, there have been a few dance notation systems that have attempted to capture choreography in writing. One of these systems, the Stepanov system, was developed by Vladimir Stepanov in 1892 to document the ballets for the Imperial Theatre of Russia. 5 While we don’t have notation from the original production in St. Petersburg in 1892, we do have notation from Nikolas Sergeyev, a dancer with the Mariinsky Ballet during Marius Petipa’s final years and later the régisseur (or stage manager) from 1903 through the Russian Revolution. His notations are based on The Nutcracker and other ballets when they were mounted at the Mariinsky during the late 1890s and early 20th century; the majority of the ballets, however, are incomplete sketches at best. When he fled Russia after the Revolution, he had the foresight to take these with him, where he later became an acclaimed stager of Russian ballets in the West. Most notably, he staged The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty, and Giselle for the Vic-Wells company (later England’s Royal Ballet) and solidified the basis for what we now call the “classical ballet” canon. In 1969, Harvard University acquired the collection. More information, including digital access to parts of the collection, can be found at the Nikolai Sergeyev Dance Notations and Music Scores for Ballets (Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University). Top: Sergeyev’s notations for the “Snow Scene” Harvard Theatre Collection; Bottom: PBT’s rendition, 2012. Photo by Rich Sofranko 6 Did you Know? Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King Hoffmann was a Romantic-era author whose stories rebelled against rationalism (the dominant movement of his time was the Enlightenment, which emphasized rational thinking). He stressed a return to nature, to imagination, and creativity. The main character’s name in Hoffmann’s original story is Marie, which is also the name PBT uses. Dumas changed the name to Clara in his 1844 version, the name many ballet companies use in their productions. Hoffmann’s Marie feels constrained by her family’s rituals and regulations. The family name, Stahlbaum (“steel tree”) reflects her feeling of restriction. Dumas changed the family name to Silberhaus (“silver house”)—a gentler image. (PBT uses Stahlbaum.) Hoffmann’s name for the uncle, Drosselmeyer, loosely translated means “one who stirs things up.” “The Story of the Hard Nut” is a story within Hoffmann’s Nutcracker that explains how the nephew became disfigured and was turned into a Nutcracker. This is generally not included in ballet versions of the story.