Other Delights

Last week, during the first Fjord Review Dance Critics’ Festival, Mindy Aloff discussed and read from an Edwin Denby essay during “The Critic’s Process” panel. In the essay, titled, “Meaning in ‘The Nutcracker’,” Denby deconstructs the Christmas ballet to uncover associations and sexual symbols he finds in the fairy tale, controlled and clarified through the suite ballet form.

Performance

“No President” by Nature Theatre of Oklahoma / “The Hard Nut” by Mark Morris / “A Very Sw!ng Out Holiday” directed by Caleb Teicher

Place

NYU Skirball / Harvey Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music / The Joyce Theater, New York, NY, December 2024

Words

Candice Thompson

Nature Theater of Oklahoma in “No President.” Photograph by Heinrich Brinkmöller-Becker

After revisiting this psychoanalytic deep dive, it is hard not to wonder what he might make of the other holiday delights seen in New York City this December, including “No President,” a strange confection from Nature Theater of Oklahoma that came to NYU Skirball earlier in the month. The experimental spectacle sets a gore-filled story of betrayal and ultimately, friendship, against a fragmented arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s iconic holiday score. Given that this production was created in the aftermath of the 2016 election, it is no surprise the characters, wacky and degenerate, seem somehow relatable.

The highly detailed plot follows a sad sack security guard, Mikey, who is part of a team guarding a theater. Set backstage, where no one seems to know what lies beyond the curtain, Mikey and his best friend Georgie communicate through a shared movement vocabulary and while the hours away rehearsing their moves and pining for their supervisor—that is when they are not “inspecting the fourth wall for holes” (the theater jokes are too numerous to count) or battling with the Ballet Bandits, a rival security company made up of ex-dancers. They are afraid of both perceived threats to the “property,” like the Bandits, and the lack of threats, which pose an existential threat to their livelihood. Mikey, who turns out to contain sociopathic multitudes, never speaks; ditto for the rest of the cast except for a lone narrator, Robert M. Johanson.

Johanson’s performance is virtuosic in duration and control: little is left to the imagination as text and subtext, interior monologue and dialogue, references and allusions, and arcane words (for which a glossary was provided) are all voiced in an even, almost dispassionate tone. The other performers dance and pantomime the action: calisthenics, running, fight choreography, and the occasional ballet step. At pivotal moments in the Byzantine plot, Johanson morphs into the devil, coaching Mikey so he can rise to the unlikely position of president of the security company. Through it all—Mikey devouring Georgie in a battle scene, multiple suicide attempts from multiple characters, and a gang rape courtesy of Mikey’s personal demons, who haunt the stage like the twisted spirits of Romantic ballets but with balloon penises dangling between their legs—the performer’s roles and the art of theater are in question as the battles become more meta and the lines between friend and foe are erased.

Perhaps this is what makes the final dance so cathartic. Thankfully the snippets of Tchaikovsky—which began to grate as they do when you hear them on repeat in a shopping mall—and Johanson quiet as Georgie and Mikey reunite to “Someone Like You” by Adele. They offer the duet they had been practicing throughout, reprised and complete, still campy but oddly moving. For a moment, all the carnage that preceded it fades away in their mutual harmony.

Mark Morris Dance Group's “The Hard Nut” at BAM's Next Wave Festival, 2024. Photograph by Julieta Cervantes

Back in Brooklyn at BAM’s Harvey Gilman Opera House, the Mark Morris Dance Group is performing “The Hard Nut” through Sunday. In a complete retro romp, Adrianne Lobel’s fabulous black and white, mid-century set and Martin Pakledinaz’s maximalist costume design provide an ideal world for Morris’s choreographic wit to inhabit. Rather than the over-long scene setting the first act usually entails, this party makes you grateful you were invited. The guests arrive in a sublime explosion of color and pattern where stripes and dots mix with checks and plaids. The absence of children—save for Marie and Fritz who are played by adults Mica Bernas and Christina Sahaida—is unfelt amidst all the teenage vamping from the elder sister Louise, Drosselmeier’s quirky dance party, Brandon Randolph’s swan star antics in the role of the housekeeper, a grabby tango-ing couple that gets the whole party bumping butts, and Mrs. Stahlbaum, who imbibes until she wrecks the bar cart.

And while Morris’s particular musicality and the visual feast of his design collaborators breathes new life and yes, even more associations, into the party scene, his choice to dispense with the usual gender roles that dominate the big corps de ballet dances of snow and flowers adds its own magic. By the end of act one there is no need for a blizzard to fall from the rafters because the ensemble is flying so high and flinging those tiny flakes in timed flourishes. Near the end of the high impact dance, it is breathtaking to watch the snow drift lightly from their fingertips as the dancers slow to a walk.

Rather than dispense with the culturally insensitive international dances in the second act, Morris doubles down and pokes fun at the tropes. Instead of allowing herself to be bent into a scantily clad pretzel, the Arabian princess, fully covered, manipulates her entourage. The flowers slouch over and sway, looking more like earthbound cabbage in Mrs. Stahlbaum’s dream garden than a traditional bouquet. The production also brings back a story from within the story by E.T.A. Hoffman, resulting in a scene that lends this version its name, where a Rat Queen maims a baby princess and only a young man cracking a hard golden nut between his teeth can restore her face. Around a sofa the whole Stahlbaum family waits, literally pulsing with anxiety, to be saved by Domingo Estrada Jr.’s Nutcracker prince chomping successfully into the nut. (Denby, eat your heart out.)

In a giddy pas de deux, Bernas and Estrada Jr. offer themselves to each other but rather than partner each other, the cast returns to lift them up in dreamy sequences. In another inversion of form, the coda becomes a showcase for the group, with the piqué turns in a circle and the grande pirouettes, typical reserved for the star couple, performed en masse. They leave the finale to Bernas and Estrada Jr., where the music acts as their mistletoe, initiating a series of kisses that carries over to the resetting of the living room, where Fritz and Louise catch them at it on their own television before the curtain falls.

But still there is the question: is anything more fun than getting to join the party?

Samantha Siegel and Breonna Jordan in “A Very Sw!ng Out Holiday.” Photograph by Steven Pisano

This was the second act promise delivered in “A Very Sw!ng Out Holiday” at the Joyce Theater, directed by Caleb Teicher with live music from the Eyal Vilner Big Band. But before inviting the audience onstage, the cast of 12 dancers performs Lindy Hop, Vernacular Jazz dance, and tap to a selection of holiday songs well known and loved. The curtain lifts to “Sleigh Ride,” revealing a great unison Lindy Hop jam. As the show progresses, the choreography and set ups give a social dance tour of sorts, showcasing the different tones, accents, relationships, ways of cutting in, and flourishes—many of them high-flying and flipping through the air, while others cruise and slink lower to the ground.

A dance with Teicher and Brandon Barker to “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve” (steamy vocals by Imani Rousselle) is loose and smooth and sexy—until a funny bit where Barker needs to be rescued out of a split. An improvised duet between baritone saxophone player Jay Branford and dancer Breonna Jordan is a flirtatious dialogue of notes and footwork that melds into a longer groove. But romance isn’t the only feeling in the air; there is also camaraderie and fun. Barnes shines in a solo of syncopated shoulders, where she is one with Evan Hyde’s drumming; the group pulls names out of a Santa hat to set up new combinations of dancers and dances; and Teicher skates effortlessly backward in his tap shoes in a game with the band.

The pleasures of their rhythm and swagger, in tandem with the nostalgia of the music, led the audience to wait in line for the chance to dance alongside them. Demystifying the fourth wall and assuaging our fear of missing out, “A Very Sw!ng Out Holiday,” is well situated to become an annual celebration.

Candice Thompson

Candice Thompson has been working in and around live art for over two decades. She was a dancer with Milwaukee Ballet before moving into costume design, movement education and direction, editing and arts writing. She attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, graduated from St. Mary’s College LEAP Program, and later received an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. She has written extensively about dance for publications like Andscape, The Brooklyn Rail, Dance magazine, and ArtsATL, in addition to being editorial director for DIYdancer, a project-based media company she co-founded.

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