The Nutcracker screams Christmas. For major ballet companies it’s usually their biggest spectacle of the year, with huge casts, lavish sets, all stops pulled out. So how do you make a Nutcracker for a small company such as New English Ballet Theatre, with a dozen dancers? NEBT are an admirable outfit. Director Karen Pilkington-Miksa consistently commissions new choreography, in this case from Royal Ballet first soloist Valentino Zucchetti, whose work has been seen on the Royal Opera House stage and elsewhere.
Now, this isn’t the Royal Opera House. In an intimate venue such as this, you don’t get the instant magic and suspension of disbelief a grand stage brings, just real people dancing in front of you. And a ballet like the Nutcracker needs magic because it’s a confection, and the dance’s main job is to decorate its fantastic Tchaikovsky score (here in a recorded version).
Zucchetti’s setting is contemporary: a Christmas party at Clara’s luxe home. The backdrop shows floor-to-ceiling windows, the kids at the party do the running man in between their petit allegro. There is a nice central conceit, that the Drosselmeyer character is a hypnotist, swinging his pocket watch, mesmerising guests into dancing, or Clara into dreaming up a battle between soldiers and pirates (instead of mice) and off into the land of snow. This all needs a bit more personality to really pop: more energy in the characters, more gusto in the fight scene. It needs to be less polite.
With a small cast, Zucchetti has to be inventive. And he is, creating a balance between flow and tableau, setting his 10 snowflakes into ever-changing formations, giving sweeping shape to Clara’s choreography in her pas de deux (with Nutcracker Luca De-Poli). Clara is guest dancer Liudmila Konovalova, longtime principal at Vienna State Ballet. Her years of experience are evident, everything is danced with finesse, she never drops a stitch.
The young, hard-working cast dance well (Marcos Silva has spirit and technical vigour; Audrey Nelson is a bright, sparkling Flower Queen). They’re very likable and there’s lots to enjoy. You have to take this production for what it is – a boutique company like this can’t compete with the big guns. They could inject more vitality into the first act, but what they do, they do well. Somewhere in the middle of a multiple pirouette I started to feel very Christmassy.
