‘Nutcracker’ Role: A Turning Point for Two ABT Dancers?

In the United States, budding ballerinas are raised on a diet of sugarplums. Once a year, ballet students from the tiniest towns to the biggest cities perform “The Nutcracker,” the ubiquitous, sticky-sweet Christmas ballet that represents both the prime moneymaker for many ballet companies and a dream factory for aspiring dancers.

And one of the sugar-plummiest roles girls dream of is Clara, the approximately 10-year-old little girl who receives a nutcracker doll as a gift and is subsequently led into a Christmas fairyland.

But in American Ballet Theatre’s new production of “Nutcracker”--which recently completed an engagement at the Orange County Performing Arts Center and opens at the Los Angeles Music Center Dec. 21--two critically acclaimed company dancers who will be among those dancing the role of Clara weren’t raised in “Nutcracker” culture.

Argentine Paloma Herrera, 17, says the snowflake-intensive “Nutcracker” “wouldn’t make any sense” during the hot and sunny Christmases back home. And Yan Chen, 24, of Shanghai, China, says simply: “We didn’t have Christmas.”

But both dancers say dancing Clara in “Nutcracker” represents a special Christmas present. For Chen, who joined ABT’s corps de ballet just two months ago, Clara is her first shot at a major role with the company. And for Herrera, a two-year company veteran who began her ballet training at 7, playing the young Clara is a chance to catch up on some missed pleasures of childhood.

While these two are not ABT’s only Claras this year, company artistic director Kevin McKenzie, director and choreographer of “Nutcracker,” praised the dancers for their remarkable stage presence. “They are both wonderful dancers,” McKenzie said. “Paloma has a warmth and an expansive presence on the stage; she is very believable, as is Yan, but she achieves that through a more crystalline view.”

McKenzie’s description of the two dancers’ differing styles onstage mirrors their very different off-stage personas--Herrera bubbly, girlish and living in the moment, and Chen elegantly poised and professional, with a determined, crystal-clear view of her future.

Interviewed backstage at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Chen said her Chinese dance training was very different from that in the United States. She started later--at age 12 rather than the customary 8 or so here--but said the rigors of her schooling more than made up for lost time.

In their countries, both dancers studied in highly selective, government-funded schools, rather than the anybody-can-enter system of private dance schools in which most students begin before being accepted by a professional school or a company. Chen was one of 50 chosen from 2,000 applicants.

“It is very, very different,” Chen said, her 5-foot-3-inch, 92-pound body wrapped in layers of tights, knitted leg warmers and sweaters. “In China, I had 7 1/2 years of very intense training. They try to make you very strong, they are very hard on you. That is very important to me. Looking back, every day I was crying or upset, but it made me very strong. It is not just physical training, it is mental training.

“Here, when you start, it is once a week, and nobody pushes you. If you want to do it, you have to do it yourself. There, once you go into a ballet school, you have no choice.”

Chen never questioned that choice. “I want it. I want it to happen. I want to be good. From the minute you join the school, you want to be the greatest ballerina. At a very young age, this is already in the heart. I just follow that.”

After leaving the Shanghai Dance School, she spent several years with the Washington Ballet before McKenzie invited her to go to New York to join ABT. She has not returned to China to see her family since. They have not met Peter, her husband of six months, who is in the import-export business. The two do not enjoy life in New York (“we love the countryside”) but that’s where the work is.

Neither Chen nor Herrera has achieved the rank of principal dancer with ABT; Chen is a member of the corps and Herrera is one rank above, a soloist. For Chen, playing Clara is a real career boost.

“I’ve only been with the company for two months, and I have a major role--it’s not easy for (other company members) to accept,” she said. “But after a while, I think they will understand it, because I am not faking it. I can do it. I think it would not be fair for someone who was just asked to join the company to become a principal dancer, but I have what I have. And if they recognize it, good things will happen for me. “

Herrera said she decided to become a dancer because she liked pointe shoes. Backstage, she arched her feet in their boxy pink satin cases. “And I still love them,” she sighed happily.

Herrera, who will celebrate her 18th birthday in Los Angeles (her whole family will come for the occasion), went from studying dance to a six-month stint at the School of American Ballet, the company school of the New York City Ballet. “I didn’t speak English when I came here, not one word!” she said. “No one could understand me. When I came to ABT, I thought: ‘I’d really better start learning.’ ”

Herrera is a quick study; she joined ABT at 15 and within two years became a soloist. During her first years in New York she lived with family friends; to celebrate turning 18, she has just purchased her first apartment.

“When I joined ABT, people were saying: ‘It’s a big company, you are too young!’--saying what I would (miss),” Herrera said. “But I am really happy, I think I made the right choice. . . . I really love performing, I can’t say I missed anything. I miss my family a lot, but they know, and I know, that this is the right place for me.

“From when I was 7 I started dancing really seriously, and it took away something--playing with dolls and all that. And now this is my chance to play with dolls! When you take the (nutcracker) doll, it is so personal, you can do what you feel.”

Added Herrera: “I realize that some people don’t know what they want to do, and it takes so long to decide--for me, it was so simple. I knew I wanted to be a dancer.”