Sharing the magic of The Nutcracker with my son didn’t go as expected | Canada Voices

When it comes to productions of The Nutcracker, I’ve stopped counting. I couldn’t tell you how many I’ve seen at this point in my life. I’ve reviewed a handful of them, danced in various student excerpts, and even made a cameo as a Cannon Doll on the Four Seasons stage. But despite my overwhelming familiarity with the holiday classic, this year’s National Ballet production was a big event for me. I took my four-year-old son, Malcolm. It was his very first time at the ballet.

Long before I had a family, I joked that my hypothetical kids would be forced into ballet as soon as they were out of diapers. Friends enjoyed this caricatured portrait of my future self as they could see the brushstrokes of truth within the parody. Ballet had been so formative for me, such a huge part of my childhood and adolescence, such a mainstay throughout my career, that it was only natural to dream of imparting this love to my offspring. Would they resist? Probably. For every kid who is captivated by the form’s power and exquisite beauty, there are a dozen others bored out of their minds.

Some may say four is a bit young for classical ballet. But with two parents as critics (my husband is Globe film critic Barry Hertz), Malcolm has received an early initiation into theatre and film. Plied with enough popcorn and sugary juice, he’s proven he can sit through everything from Mirvish’s The Lion King to the three-hour movie Wicked. Ballet is a concept he’s familiar with; when I go out on weekday evenings, it’s usually to ballet class. In an effort to charm me, he has taken to pointing out ballet ads on lampposts across the city or drawing my attention to dancers he sees on screens. So I had reason to believe he was ready for his first ballet.

There’s no good data on how many dancers’ origin stories begin with a trip to The Nutcracker. Anecdotally, the number must be high. It’s the gateway drug of ballets, a test of your natural predilection for (or resistance to) the art form. George Balanchine can be credited for making it an annual family tradition. His 1954 version, still performed every year at the New York City Ballet, has roles for nearly 100, all pulled from the classrooms of the School of American Ballet. This means that The Nutcracker is not only an introduction to the medium, but also a child’s glimpse into a different way of growing up, a life defined by discipline, devotion and deference. For the would-be ballerinas in the audience, this is a huge part of the appeal.

In 1984, I was one of those would-be’s. The National Ballet performed at Toronto’s O’Keefe Centre (now Meridian Hall) then, Karen Kain was the company star, and while I’m not sure she was dancing on the particular December afternoon that I saw my first Nutcracker, I remember her to be. In this older version of the ballet, Clara is transported to the land of sweets, where she spends the better part of Act 2 seated beside a multi-tiered cake, the icing lavish and detailed enough to be visible from the farthest reaches of the Orchestra section. As Clara watches the Sugar Plum Fairy dance with the Prince, she only very occasionally reaches out to run her finger along one of the petrified crests of sugar, before bringing this tiniest indulgence to her mouth.

Watching this, I marvelled at two things: the astonishing beauty of the dancing and Clara’s mind-boggling self-control. (Little did I realize I’d soon be properly initiated in both.) Along with countless other little girls in the audience, I projected myself into Clara’s experience, a journey to an otherworldly realm where tragic feelings were articulated through the most exquisite physical feats. With a certainty I can only admire now, I knew instantly that this was for me – I was meant to be a dancer – and I began lobbying my mother to enrol me in ballet class.

I have never managed to quit ballet, despite several honest attempts. When, at 14, the National Ballet School rejected me after their month-long summer audition process, I thought I’d never dance again. But my body couldn’t let go of the habit; I pointed my toes in yoga class and jogging and cycling used all the wrong muscles. As an undergrad, I found myself back in the studio and, when I travelled in Europe, it was both thrilling and convenient to take classes in London, Paris and Berlin. No matter where you go in the world, ballet classes adhere to the same rules, the same technique, the same progression of steps. I could walk into a studio in Prenzlauer Berg, the former East Berlin neighbourhood where I lived for several months, and know exactly what was expected of me. My training was an international passport, and ballet class was a place where I could speak fluently without knowing the local language.

When I picked Malcolm up at his after-care on the evening in question, he dutifully changed out of his Batman T-shirt and jogging pants and into the corduroys and knit sweater I’d brought from home. After a quick pizza dinner, we arrived at the Four Seasons Centre with plenty of time to read the synopsis. I instructed him to look out for a bear on roller skates, a dancing horse, an army of human-sized mice, and a Christmas tree that will grow before his eyes.

After the overture played and the scrim lifted, Malcolm was quiet for five minutes before his behaviour deteriorated. “Where is the real ballet?” he demanded, pointing at the Sugar Plum Fairy on the program cover, with her pink tights and layered tulle. I had to admit, the young critic had a point. In James Kudelka’s version of the ballet, which has been in the National’s repertoire for nearly thirty years, there’s nary a pointe shoe nor tutu on stage until right before intermission.

The rest of Malcolm’s grievances were more characteristic of his age. When he fell asleep early into Act 2, I considered it for the best. In the days that followed, when people asked how he’d enjoyed the ballet, he alternated between saying “I loved it!” and “I hated it!” At first, I figured he was just see-sawing between giving the answer he thought people wanted and something closer to how he actually felt. But I started to wonder if there was something more interesting in his ambivalence – something that echoed my own complex feelings about ballet and the mix of joy and pain it has brought me all these years.

There’s a whole other essay to be written on that, which can’t be squeezed in here. Maybe it’s best left for next year’s Nutcracker. I plan to take my daughter, who’ll turn four just in time.