When I was five years old, my mother took me to my first of many performances of The Nutcracker. According to her, my excitement for dancing snowflakes and, yes, anthropomorphic rats, failed to wear off even after I left the theatre. Like so many other children, that performance set off my interest in, and later my commitment to ballet. Two years later, I performed The Nutcracker on the same stage I first saw it on (I was one of the party guests).
These memories were front and centre for me when I attended opening night of The Nutcracker, performed by the National Ballet of Canada at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. It’s the most recent program of the company’s 2024-2025 season that I’ve had the pleasure of seeing, preceded by Giselle in November, and the company’s opening mixed bill in October.
While these repertory works were stylistically and narratively unique, I couldn’t help but recognize a similar feeling each time I sat in the audience to see them: that childlike wonder that makes me, and so many others, fall in love with dance over and over again.
Having been a dancer my whole life, it’s second nature for me to know what makes going to the ballet so special. But in experiencing live performance of this caliber again, I recognized that others may not. Why is ballet not only a tradition we continue to perform, but one we continue to go and see?
In part, it’s the unique aspects of attending the ballet that complement the dancing itself. I’ve had many enjoyable experiences of seeing theatre in the Greater Toronto Area, but the ballet continues to feel like an event, one that encourages dress and decorum not replicated elsewhere. While recent Toronto theatre productions often have small casts and simple set designs, so many things make the ballet feel grand, from the sheer volume of people involved to the scale and intricacy of the stagecraft.
A prime contributor to this grandeur, though, is the full orchestra that performs some of the greatest compositions in music history, from the sweeping romantic scores of Piotr Ilych Tchaikovsky, to the sparse repetitions of Philip Glass. Accompaniment of this stature is an increasing rarity in live performance, yet the National Ballet of Canada’s orchestra, under the direction of principal conductor David Briskin, contributes irreplaceable emotional depth to the happenings on stage.
This was perhaps best exemplified by the National Ballet’s recent performance of Sir Frederick Ashton’s 1980 Rhapsody. While this technically challenging work is largely without narrative, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s stirring “Rhapsody in the Theme of Paganini” guides it to stunning emotional apexes, most notably in the pas de deux I saw so brilliantly executed by Tirion Law and Siphesihle November. The two principal dancers begin by navigating muted yet intricate partner work as a lone piano forlornly plucks away. But then, strings join in a billowing crescendo, prompting the dancers to execute daring over-the-head lifts and swooping drops. Totally engaging sight and sound, the sentiment that dancers and musicians realized together was unmatched: I’ve since been listening to Rachmaninoff on repeat.
Of course, the primary draw to any ballet is the dancers themselves. While the rigour of theatre training is nothing to balk at, joining a company like the National Ballet of Canada reflects a commitment that’s largely without comparison. Ballet dancers’ dedication to style, detail, and stamina is what makes watching them so profound. They can astound in their capacity to challenge the limits of their bodies, or please with their softly landed jumps and clean unison movement. Their aesthetic qualities are what set watching the ballet apart from other, more narrative-driven forms of performance, regardless of whether you’re watching a story ballet.
The admirable qualities of the National Ballet’s dancers were on full display in one such story ballet, Giselle. Often referred to as “the ballet Hamlet,” the piece tells of a young peasant woman who dies when learning that her suitor, Albrecht, has betrayed her. A perennial staple of ballet repertory, many parts of Giselle’s choreography — its variations — are set across re-stagings, and learned by ballet students as they begin professional-level training. These traditions behind Giselle were clear as I watched performers execute petite allegro (quick jumps where the feet beat back and forth in the air) in the famed pas de six (dance of six), and as I marvelled at principal Harrison James showcasing some of the cleanest extensions and landings I’ve seen. It was these attributes, the physical results of these dancers’ lifelong practices, that drew the awe and applause of the audience beyond Giselle’s narrative.
Something else feels present with the dancers on stage, though: those who came before them.
Perhaps the greatest misconception about ballet is that its practice has remained the same for centuries. Yet looking at a tradition that’s continued since Louis XIV, one will find dancers and choreographers across history who questioned, then innovated, the form we see today. Ballet’s history is embodied by its dancers’ movements; it circulates in the air of the theatres it’s performed in; and it promotes a respect for the past as much as it celebrates the possibilities of today. The power of ballet’s history is what compels the National Ballet to re-imagine works like The Nutcracker, crowd-pleasing mainstays that have been performed since Russia’s imperial age. But that history also informs the contemporary offerings that they bring in, including Silent Screen, choreographed by Paul Lightfoot and Sol León in 2005, and performed by the National Ballet this season.
So in asking, “Why should you see the ballet?,” the answer perhaps lies in how seeing the ballet can become an integral event of our own histories. So many people have a Nutcracker story, a memory that sparks nostalgia and warm reminiscence when it gets to be this time of year. Whether you’re seeing that production or another, that connection to history is what maintains ballet’s novelty among other performance offerings. How will its history become your own?
WRITTEN BY
Martin Austin
Martin Austin is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies. Martin’s research explores the past and current state of ethics in Euro-American dance practice. He is research assistant for Category Is, a study of house ballroom communities in Toronto and Montréal, and lead administrative coordinator of the Institute for Dance Studies.
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