‘Nutcrackers’ : Nutty, Cracked-Up ‘Nutcrackers’

Picture this “Nutcracker”:

Clara is first a black, then an Asian, and finally a Latin American refugee. Drosselmeyer is a homosexual, skateboarding punk whose lover just died of AIDS. The Nutcracker is an African woman warrior who alerts Clara to possibilities for upgrading her life. “The Waltz of the Flowers” is a prancing catalogue of endangered species--including flamingos dying of radiation poisoning.

This fervently topical scenario is the basis of the Berkeley-based Dance Brigade’s “The Revolutionary Nutcracker Sweetie,” which closes a six-performance run today in Oakland’s Laney College Theater. It represents the dance world’s newest answer to that perennial Christmas quiz for choreographers: “How would you stage ‘The Nutcracker’ today?”

The five members of this feminist dance collective have answered with a two-act, two-hour treatise on what ails America and the world.

“We first began to think of doing a ‘Nutcracker’ four or five years ago,” says Nina Fichter, co-founder of the Dance Brigade and co-choreographer of its anti-Sugar Plum “Nutcracker.”

“Like everyone else, we knew ‘Nutcracker’ was the ideal vehicle for expanding our audience. The problem was, it’s such a status quo ballet. We wanted to do a ‘Nutcracker’ that said something. We wanted it to be a production that made people relate to dance as part of their lives.”

The Dance Brigade’s “Nutcracker” is nothing if not rabidly anti- status quo.

Oakland composer Mary Watkins has adapted Tchaikovsky’s durable score into a booming jazz-rock opus played by a pit band of rock musicians and a string quartet.

Although (as in George Balanchine’s traditional version) the Mouse King is a seven-headed monster, each head, according to Fichter, represents one of this decade’s banal masters of evil: Augusto Pinochet, Jim Bakker, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, P. W. Botha, Pope John Paul II and Lt. Col. Oliver L. North.

The libretto, created by New York writer Cathy Cevoli, sounds like a Dr. Seuss rewrite of “The Communist Manifesto.” A sample:

McGreed (the Brigade’s renaming of Mr. Stahlbaum, host to the first-act Christmas party) owned the foundry, the highway, the school,

The gas and electric, the clubhouse, the pool The radio station, and that isn’t all. He owned the museum. He owned City Hall. He owned all the water in everyone’s wells, The basketball team and the better hotels. The college was his, and the board of trustees. In the park he owned Shakespeare and all of the trees. And from very high up in his corporate quarters, He managed the paper and all the reporters, The railroad, the fountain, and saddest to say, He owned the ballet, Though he couldn’t plie.

The Dance Brigade version, while distinctly sui generis, joins a surprisingly long list of adventuresome (if not nutty) “Nutcracker” restagings. Indeed, these revisionist productions are part of a tradition of changes that began as soon the ballet premiered in 1892.

When Lev Ivanov first presented his choreography based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale of a childhood Eden haunted with magical wonder and terrifying visions of evil, Czar Alexander III was one of the few in the audience at St. Petersburg’s Maryinsky Theater who was pleased.

Those who weren’t--designers and choreographers foremost among them--started tinkering with “The Nutcracker” almost immediately.

The Russians themselves mounted one of the first major revisions in a short-lived production after World War I that gave a Marxist interpretation to the ballet’s battle between the toy soldiers and regiments of mice.

Other productions have featured rats of a different order. One of the most often exploited relationships in the ballet is that between Clara and her godfather, Dr. Drosselmeyer. Freudian interpretations have always been popular, particularly among male choreographers.

Rudolf Nureyev’s 1968 production for the Royal Ballet focused on the dark side of the relationship between Clara and Drosselmeyer, depicting a young girl sexually obsessed with a limping old man.

What one writer referred to as “this agony of the analyst’s couch and tortured sexuality brought into ‘Nutcracker’ ” continued, albeit in a more jocular vein, in designer Maurice Sendak’s 1983 production for Kent Stowell’s Pacific Northwest Ballet. Here hints of a manipulative and sadistic relationship between Drosselmeyer and Clara and Clara’s little brother added a contemporary edge of nightmarish horror to the plot. Stowell’s production was subsequently adapted for “Nutcracker: The Motion Picture.”

In a 1966 production for Stuttgart Ballet, John Cranko jettisoned the idea of a Christmas party altogether, making the opening celebration Clara’s birthday. Instead of Drosselmeyer, an eccentric aunt watched over Clara and steered Clara’s cavalier back to her when he started to stray toward other pretty faces in the shuffling multitude at the party.

John Neumeier, a dancer in Cranko’s production, took artistic license a step further when he created his “Nutcracker” in 1971 for the Frankfurt Ballet, a production now also danced by Royal Winnipeg Ballet.

Instead of a Christmas visit to lands of candy and snow, Marie (a.k.a. Clara) dreamed of being a dancer. For her birthday, the Nutcracker Prince took her to a land of Degas and the practice barre and a toy stage that became a real one.

Similarly, in 1982, Santa Cruz dance maker Tandy Beal created a “Nutcracker” that included a savvy collage of movement forms, including a gang of “West Side Story”-style mice, a scarf dance a la Loie Fuller, flamboyant roller skating and suave ballroom dance. (The Beal version turned up in the Los Angeles area last year, courtesy of Cal State Fullerton.)

Peter Anastos threw the thematic equivalent of a hand grenade into his 1975 production of ‘Nutcracker’ for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, the all-male travesty ballet troupe he co-founded.

Reached by telephone last week at his home in Manhattan, Anastos reminisced about his lost-but-not-forgiven version.

“What we succeeded in doing was finally destroying the indestructible ballet,” Anastos said with more pride than sorrow in his voice.

“From the first act party scene, ours was a deviant ‘Nutcracker.’ The guests were all Trock ballerinas who behaved like monstrous children--the kind you’d like to kill. Clara was real dipsy, a pre-adolescent mess. She electrocuted herself by touching the pink aluminum Christmas tree.’

Anastos said his production skipped the fight between the mice and toy soldiers “because the party scene looked so much like Beirut anyway, we had no need for another battle scene.” Among the second act divertissements was a Chinese dance featuring two Red Chinese guards carrying “Quotations From Chairman Mao” and a Dewdrop fairy (danced by Anastos) who made her entrance on a swing, narrowly missing the corps.

Clearly “The Nutcracker” was born to a life of artistic ravaging. Each plundering, in a sense, is a re-examination of the values that have made the ballet so durable and a public reaffirmation of those qualities that keep it alive. Even the most daring dance rebels can’t resist its hold on the imagination. Nina Fichter of the Dance Brigade is no exception.

“I can’t do anything that doesn’t have political content,” she says, explaining the genesis of her new version. “So when the Dance Brigade started this project, I was really worried.”

“Krissy Keefer (co-founder of the company) and I had just been to the San Francisco Ballet ‘Nutcracker’ (a traditional version) and afterwards, we said, ‘Oh my God! How are we going to get anything out of it (the ballet’s plot)?’

“But we were amazed at the flexibility of the ballet and the liberties so many people have taken with it over the years. It really is an amazing story. It just needed some fine-tuning.”