A Recipe for ‘Nutcracker’ Success

If recipes for sugarplums--the confection made world famous by “The Nutcracker”--are hardly commonplace nowadays, formulas for the making of a ballerina are even more elusive.

Some of the ingredients became more evident as the Joffrey Ballet recently prepared the relatively unknown Meg Gurin for her first performance as the Sugar Plum Fairy in its production of “The Nutcracker.”

Gurin, 22, danced this classical showcase role for the first time in Southern California on Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center and faces a Los Angeles audience next Thursday at 2 p.m. in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. As she recently paused between rehearsals to talk about her personal route to the plum role, she described the pleasure she found in the character’s very first moments in the action.

At curtain-up in Act II, the Sugar Plum Fairy is poised on pointe, center stage, surrounded by a female ensemble of flower maidens. In a moment, she begins to glide about grandly, introducing all on hand to “The Kingdom of Sweets,” and Gurin spoke warmly of “the whole feeling of presenting the world to (Clara), showing her and directing her around. I really enjoy that, making this whole land come alive.”

These remarks complement the recall she has from her early years at the School of Performing Arts in Florida when she first worked in a pair of pointe shoes.: “Oh, that was the dream! That’s when ballet really took off and started to become something that I knew I’d do for the rest of my life.

“It wasn’t just, ‘Oh, I’m getting the technical thing,’ I started to get this driving force--everything was centered toward that!” She looks down as if 12 years ago were only a minute earlier.

Next to the element of ballerina grandeur, Gurin made a case for unswerving concentration. In a rehearsal overseen by two ballet-masters (Gerald Arpino and Scott Barnard) and one ballet-mistress (Barbara Forbes), Gurin remained cool and calm.

She would be performing her first prominent role in a couple of days and some things were not yet smooth or sure. Was Gurin edgy, prone to excuses or extraneous explanations? Not in the least. She worked through every detail called to her attention, stopping and repeating as often as time allowed and her taskmasters suggested.

“You always feel like you’d like a little bit more rehearsal,” she said later, “but I think that’s a really good point to be at, where you’ve had just enough to where you think, ‘God, I wish I had just one more rehearsal.’ It kind of gives you a little bit of (something) for that first performance.”

Arpino, the company’s artistic director, recalled it was this kind of focus that first attracted him to Gurin, when she was a scholarship student in the Joffrey School. “Her concentration, her artistry to herself, I always notice the individual artist who almost has an aura around herself, no matter where (in class) she is, even in the back, you can always tell the young artist who is dedicated,” he says.

Barnard, now the group’s assistant artistic director, recalled the teen-age Gurin when she was in his classes for two weeks of a summer program: “She had that focus, that natural focus from training, of course, and the dedication. Her technical ability was even further along than the normal 14-year-old.”

Today, he elaborated: “She’s dedicated to the point of being patient--she’ll sit for hours doing one step, and a lot of people cannot do that or even fathom it, but Meg finds it exciting to spend an hour on one step to perfect it. That’s top dancing quality.”

For this debut, the company will pair Gurin with Pascal Benichou, a newcomer to the Joffrey who joined this past July. Gurin had no previous experience dancing with Benichou in her already sizeable repertory of lesser roles.

Would she be happier with a veteran Nutcracker Prince? “No, I really like it this way. It makes it that much more special, that it’s such a special thing for him too. So, together we’re really creating something brand-new, the two of us, that first time.

“To be able to just mold ourselves with each other and to create a relationship through the pas de deux, for the audience, for the whole land of the Sugar Plum.”

Arpino, who hired Benichou (previously with San Francisco Ballet) when he lost a group of his seasoned male dancers at the end of last season and who, along with Barnard, mutually paired Gurin with the unfamiliar Frenchman, echoed this confident view: “I wait to see the relationship. It’s like a love affair--how each will then sense the other’s rhythms, the other’s needs at a particular time, and each strength will start to build, and out of that will come another sort of relationship.”

Added to the grandeur that Gurin likes to display, and the concentration with which she approaches her work, Barnard chose her “warmth” and Arpino her “lyricism” to further explain why they chose Gurin.

Gurin gave some thought to what she’d like to exemplify for the numerous young people in the production itself and the enumerable children who attend the performances:

“I hope I can show the love of the art form, the consideration for people on stage and working together. That image of the snooty ballerina isn’t especially so with the Joffrey. It just doesn’t exist. Everybody is so together and for one another, it makes it wonderful to be here. I’d love to show that.”