Our family had an imaginary friend, the Legozwerg, who could be plied with nuts, left out overnight, to produce some pretty amazing Lego creations. Nuts for the Legozwerg became an often used and obviously ambiguous phrase – we were nuts for him, but also left nuts out for him.

Replace Legozwerg with art critic, and you have my admiration for what they pull off, particularly when doing performance reviews. Not only do I go nuts for them, they also have tough nuts to crack – given that things move forward in time, need to be assessed quickly and then remembered. They have to attend to so many different aspects of  a performance, and never more so than when they watch a ballet. The music, the dancing, the choreography, the costuming, the stagecraft, the link to history or the daring deviation from it – my head spins just thinking about it and I haven’t even twirled once around my room.

I have the privilege of being friends with someone, Martha Ullman West, who writes first-rate reviews;  I thought I’d link to one that exemplifies for me what good performance writing is all about: critical analysis, deepening our understanding of the emotional as well as the artistic core of a piece, and providing occasion for both learning and fun.

http://www.orartswatch.org/in-stride-a-tight-bright-nutcracker/

Unfortunately I could not find a videoclip of the OBT version that worked in the blog due to privacy settings – but they are out there on VIMEO…

And while looking for other fitting examples of Nutcracker productions, I learned that there is an “Annual Battle of the Nutcrackers” where you can choose the ballet most to your liking from 4 or 5 contenders (presented by a channel called Ovation. Hhm. ). I picked some more traditional and a contemporary version – hope you enjoy them.

 

 

Photographs depict young OBT dancers rehearsing for Crayola.  Just loved their faces.