Alison Chase Performance & Apogee Arts - Choreographer

Performance Review: An Urban Nutcracker

• Hip-Hop Sugarplums

By Gwendolyn Freed - December 30, 1998 - Published in the Wall Street Journal

There aren't enough flowers in the world to sufficiently shower the Cleveland School of the Arts and Pilobolus Dance Theater, whose Christmas collaboration, "An Urban Nutcracker," was for this visitor the best gift of the season. At the Cuyahoga Community College not far from downtown, its run of nine performances concluded recently with interesting timing. Amid the grotesquery in politics and the uncertainty in the Middle East - not to mention the unashamed greed and gluttony of the season - here was something real, something true, something marvelous enough to restore, if only briefly, both high hopes and magic.

The Cleveland School of the Arts is a 17-year-old arts magnet public school of 638 students, grades six through 12. "An Urban Nutcracker" is the fruit of a long-term relationship between a CSA dance ensemble known as YARD (Youth at Risk Dancing) and Alison Chase, who is an artistic director of the Pilobolus Dance Theater and head of Pilobolus Institute, the dance company's educational arm. Ms. Chase worked with YARD's 40 students on improvisation projects over a period of several years and in 1996, when the time seemed right, she suggested that they take a crack at the "Nutcracker."

The students then worked up their own, urban retelling of the classic E.T.A. Hoffmann tale. They choreographed the piece with nontraditional, Pilobolus-style partnering techniques as well as a broad range of popular urban dance forms. Thanks largely to funds raised by the Friends of the Cleveland School of the Arts, sets went up, costumes were created, and rehearsals got underway. Ms. Chase and YARD director Bill Wade coached the cast. Other adults were recruited for the effort, including costume designer Angelina Avallone, and Karin Tooley who, together with Neil Chastain, created and performed the show's eclectic original score. That said, ultimate ownership of the creation, it seems, can rightly be claimed by the students themselves, whose distinctive vision comes through from the show's very opening.

Foregoing Balanchine's lavish Stahlbaum house with its 40-foot Christmas tree, CSA students begin their "Nutcracker" in the Cleveland apartment of the Washingtons, a single-mom family. Preparations are underway for a big Christmas bash. Relatives, friends and neighborhood gang leaders Spider Queen and Rat King arrive, variously doing hip-hop, salsa, breakdancing and meringue moves.

When DrosselMorgan (Darius Williams) makes his entrance it's clear that despite his bare chest and the goggles cocked to the side of his shaved head, his character owes much to Hoffmann's Herr Drosselmeyer; he's magical, always full of surprises. Like Drosselmeyer, he hands out presents to the party guests, but the gifts are Nike sneakers and Tommy Hilfiger clothes. To his goddaughter Meisha (Kalowa Samano) he gives a dress and, in lieu of a nutcracker, he presents her with an action figure doll, clearly the Prince. Meisha's happiness over this is short-lived, however; her brother and sister fight over the toy, breaking it in two.

The action figure's human counterpart is played by Cleotha McJunkins III, 17, a highly expressive dancer of seemingly superhuman strength and flexibility. Meisha's tender touches bring him back to life, whereupon a turf war breaks out between the Rat Gang and the Spider Gang. Rat King is intent on killing the Prince and repeatedly throws him to the ground. With the Prince near death, Meisha steps forward for one of the show's many stunning updates. Whereas in the original, Marie implausibly fells the Mouse Kind with a toss of her slipper, Meisha bodyslams Rat King, saving the Prince.

The ensuing pas de deux between Meisha and the Prince is one of the few classical moments in the show. As Karin Tooley plays Tchaikovsky-style piano riffs, Meisha seems to float in the arms of the Prince. In the snow scene that follows, 12 dancers work in quartets, linking arms and morphing into shapes that recall snow crystals falling through the air. Their lovely white, polar fleece costumes are Ethiopian in inspiration with geometric designs running down the pantlegs and cut out of the tops.

Next, a group of young boys spills, ragtag, out onto a city street, doing gymnastics and bouncing balls in perfect time to the varied syncopations of contemporary percussion music. Eventually a girl comes onstage and stuff one of the balls up her shirt to fake a huge bustline. She struts, and the boys are impressed. A few beats later she turns around, now the ball is down at her belly: she's pregnant and the boys want nothing to do with her.

DrosselMorgan then escorts the Prince, Meisha and the boys through three journeys. The first trip, to Pairs, is modern dance as haute couture. Dancers - in an unmistakable Pilobolus touch - "wear" other dancers, lifting them, draping them on their backs and striding, as if down a fashion show runway. The next trip, to China, offered muted costumes, subdued music and martial-arts moves, all of which is a welcome alternative to the Balanchine "Nutcracker's" vaguely racist treatment of China. Finally a jubilant Caribbean carnival on the island of Trinidad brings virtually all the dancers onstage, filling the space with noise and vibrant color.

On their return to Cleveland, Meisha and the Prince are once more magically entwined in a duet. At the close of this farewell dance, Meisha awakens from her dream, and the show is over.

The CSA's mission - to help at-risk kids break out of poverty through education - seems somehow modest next to the obvious preprofessional skill and poise of these dancers, who have leapt much higher than anyone might have hoped. At "An Urban Nutcracker," "risk factors" including poverty, neglect and gang culture seem to recede, crowded off the stage by the force and heft of the dancers' strength, precision and sheer will.