In the Wings, Part One

You were sick of it: the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, the Waltz of the Flowers, that five minute Overture. Perhaps you saw (and were tortured by) Care Bears: The Nutcracker, or Barbie in the Nutcracker. Maybe you managed to reserve a bit of critical snobbery for the dancing mushroom sequence in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. (Perhaps another kind of mushrooms helped.) In any case, it was the first ballet you were dragged to when you were a child. You snickered at the men in tights, yet wondered how that Christmas tree magically grew. You knew that theater mechanics were required to make it all work, yet a part of you believed—or wanted to believe; needed to believe—that magic was still possible.
You grew up; you thought, No way. You lived in San Francisco, but the Nutcracker staged by the excellent ballet company there…well, that was for kids from Contra Costa County and retirees from Hillsborough. Not you. You had taste. You moved on. To Trisha Brown, Mark Morris, Lar Lubovitch. When one of the New York or European companies swung through the Bay Area, you caught at least one of their shows. When you moved to New York City, you subscribed to dance wherever you could. You were in the dance capital of the country, and there were so many venues for dance, almost too many. The Joyce. Brooklyn Academy of Music. City Center. And of course, Lincoln Center. And the companies and choreographers! Ballet Frankfurt. Paul Taylor. Martha Graham. Rosas. Pina Bausch. You made discoveries of your own, companies you’d never heard of out in California: Susan Marshall, Doug Varone, Wally Cardona. You realized that the Joyce didn’t have a bad seat in the house; you noticed that Mark Morris went through an ecumenical phase and came through it a better choreographer. You saw a performance of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s “Rain,” set to Steve Reich’s “Music for Eighteen Musicians,” and tears came to your eyes because how could anything be so simple, so beautiful, and so moving. How could movement be moving?
Eventually you found yourself living in Western New York, with your brother, a retired professional dancer, who started a ballet school with his wife, also a retired dancer. You thought you could be of some help to them, at least for a couple of months, and two months turned into four, four into six, and before you knew it, you were caught up in preparations for their non-professional production of that tired old chestnut. They wanted to cast you as Mother Ginger, as a lark, and even considered you for Drosselmeyer, but you ended up as Clara’s father. You have other duties, important duties, in and around the production beside this role: grantwriting, fundraising, writing press releases, handling various administrative tasks, and you make light of your upcoming “debut” in the Nutcracker.
Until it begins to dawn on you that these kids have studied dance all their lives. That they have done so regardless of their color, their weight, their body type, their ability, their talent. That their parents make sacrifices of time and money to get them to class, weather permitting. That those parents drive them faithfully, for the most part, to rehearsals every weekend. That they’ve helped with fundraising and volunteer work. You realize that your own grantwriting and administrative work has been a part of this production, like it or not. And during rehearsal, you find yourself wanting to be as good as you possibly can. You keep missing the count in the parents’ second dance, and you haven’t rehearsed enough yourself, but you’re good at the miming and gestures that help bring the Party Scene to life. You recognize cues in the music you didn’t know were there, because you’re familiar with Tchaikovsky’s suite and not the full ballet score.