Maurice Bejart`s Nutcracker

When one trots an old warhorse like The Nutcracker out, it's often advisable to give it a few coats of paint in order to make it seem somewhat new and different. Choreographer Maurice Bejart takes that advice and truly runs with it in this highly novel and disorienting version of Tchaikovsky's charming ballet. Instead of little Clara and the Nutcracker who becomes Prince Charming, we instead get the story of a boy and a catalogue of perversions, obsessions and delusions. We begin at the same place as the familiar version based on E.T.A. Hoffman's fairy tale, with a Christmas tree. But matters immediately depart from there into a semi-autobiographical essay with highly disturbing imagery and distressing subtext. The hero, young Bim (Damaas Thijs), is bereft of his mother at his seventh Christmas. This leads us into a series of dances which tie together the dual threads of an unresolved Oedipal fixation and a desire to return to the womb. Bim's mother (Elisabet Ros) reappears several times, and Bim always manages to maneuver himself between her legs (one of the last times, in the guise of Prince Charming to mother's Clara). He sublimates these desires in a need to dance. Bim leaves his native Marseilles for London, where he pursues his dancing career under the tutelage of Nikolai Sergeyev, channeling the spirit of the dead choreographer Marius Petipa (Gil Roman). Roman doubles as Mephisto, implying some kind of Faustian bargain. The nature of this bargain is highly unclear until we see a dance of boy scouts being placed into sleeping bags and then harassed by a pair of bearded women accompanied by Marilyn Monroe. Her presence lends the key to the sexual character of the bearded women and there is no doubt that Bim's career is possible only through compliance with homosexual favors to older dancers or patrons. At the same time, Bim erects a monumental statue resembling the central figure of Botticelli's Birth of Venus, representing The Ideal Mother and unsuccessfully attempts to scale it and to clamber onto its breasts. In a truly weird bit of imagery, the statue turns to reveal an enormous vaginal opening whence emerges Bim's mother, and, after sensuous dancing together, they both return to the eternal womb. Clearly we're a long way from Clara and the Mouse King here. The second act, with its many familiar dances, is here largely devoted to Bejart's impressionistic recollections of the Marseilles of his youth, turned into a circus ring. The Spanish dance portrays his fantasies of being a matador, and the Chinese Dance is mysteriously shown by Mao-suited Chinese riding bicycles (the voiceover explanation at the end being that everyone in Marseilles rode bicycles during the war, as if it were a Chinese village). Bim's accordion-playing fairy godmother makes an appearance and interrupts Tchaikovsky's score with several popular French songs, including one which Bim sings (badly) along to. Even approaching the reinterpretation with an open mind, it is difficult to accept this emendation of the classic albeit saccharine score. Bejart surprisingly includes the traditional choreography of the Pas de Deux, a gesture which somewhat but not entirely makes up for the brutalization of the score. While there is definitely some interesting and arresting imagery to be seen here, the subtexts are nearly revolting. To add insult to injury, the fairy godmother resembles in no small part the Lady in the Radiator from David Lynch's Eraserhead. Why does she play the accordion? Apparently because the dancer who portrays her can do so. Gil Roman is an effective stage presence as both Mephisto and the Mephistophelean Marius Petipa. Bim is a singularly uninteresting and frankly annoying hero who doesn't elicit sympathy as much as revulsion. Juichi Kobayashi is simultaneously interesting and unsympathetic as Felix the Cat, who leaps and laughs at all of Bim's Freudian nightmares and mocks his introspection and self-absorption. Bejart is present as a godlike overseeing figure, projected between numbers onto an enormous screen overhanging the dancers. Here he gives a narration which loosely ties the episodes together. To highlight the fact that this is A New And Different Production, there is also dialogue added to some sequences, as well as a film clip of Bejart's grandmother giving her recollections of his childhood. These sequences are presented in French, with an English voice overlaying the French; this would have been a good place to use subtitles, frankly, because this manner of presentation is highly unpleasant. But I guess that's appropriate, given the subtext of this production.