People 'creeped out' after learning the origin story of The Nutcracker
The Nutcracker has long been a firm favourite of ballet lovers the world over, with Tchaikovsky’s tale loosely based on ETA Hoffman’s fantasy story 'The Nutcracker and the Mouse King’, about a girl who befriends a nutcracker that comes to life on Christmas Eve and wages a battle against the evil Mouse King.
One week before Christmas in 1892, Tchaikovsky’s adaptation of the tale was first shown to the sold-out audience of the Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia. What may surprise you, however, is that all is not quite what it seems behind the scenes in the modern-day adaptation of this original tale, and there’s a sinister reason why.
The terrifying plot of the original tale begins when Marie, a 7-year-old girl, is told a story by her grandfather about a man cursed by a witch to become an ugly nutcracker, to which she told him she would marry him anyway. Marie falls in love with the doll, and can only see him come alive when she falls asleep.
In one dreamlike state, Marie falls into a glass cabinet, slicing open her arm after witnessing the gruesome battle between this nutcracker prince and the seven-headed mouse king. While she heals from the wound, the mouse king brainwashes her while she’s sleeping. And while her family forbid her from speaking of her ‘dreams’ to them any more, she vows to love the ugly nutcracker, and when he comes alive while she's sleeping, she marries him.
Once married, the two of them leave her real life forever to live in the doll kingdom. Now Marie is purely a ghost of a girl, existing only to take care of her imagined prince; a girl who vanishes and is dominated forever more in a creepily cruel kingdom dominated by dolls.
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With salon.com heralding The Nutcracker in its modern form to currently paving the ideal showcase for ballet schools, to-date, the production has resulted in more people viewing it, and more companies performing it, than any other ballet in history.
But what is it that accounts for the extraordinary popularity of ‘The Nutcracker’ now? According to Ellen O'Connell at salon.com the fact that the beloved ballet portrays children, is for children and makes use of children, provides the ideal showcase for ballet schools. “There is a role for every age, from the tiny gingersnaps to the pre-professional and professional Dew Drop and Sugar Plum Fairies,” she says.
“Christmas encourages belief in magic against all reason; Santa fits down the chimney, and the little girl onstage falls in love with a doll that comes to life. The ballet, set at Christmas, propagates every Western message about the holiday season against a backdrop of music that even those who have never seen it can hum. "The Nutcracker" assures us we don’t need Santa for a magical Christmas celebration.”
And with that, the new Nutcracker has truly overcome its initial failure through revolution, defection and adoption and despite lingering messages about female disenfranchisement has resulted in a production that means we can all sleep easy after watching it.
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