A politically correct Nutcracker for the end of 2019?

A Politically Correct Nutcracker for the end of 2019?

With the waves of the debate on political correctness in ballet whipped up in a storm of indignation, perhaps it’s time to change the scenario of one of the more controversial productions. For example, the national characteristics Marius Petipa chose to portray in Nutcracker, which no doubt had their special significance in the Imperial Russia of 1892, correspond remarkably well to the current political landscape for which Tchaikovsky’s score might once again be appropriated. 

Petipa did not choose to portray the English in Nutcracker, possibly because the country at the time did not have a tradition of classical ballet. That, of course has changed, as has the recent political climate in the country. The first act of the ballet is set at a merry Christmas party in a wealthy family home. Given the Christmas present we have received in the election, it is tempting to see Boris Johnson in the patriarchal role with his latest paramour entertaining his Conservative friends while Etonian schoolboys run around creating mischief with their toy trumpets and miniature JCB diggers. Jeremy Corbin is in the avuncular role of Drosselmeyer who gives Clara the magic gift of speaking truth to power. Armed with this incalculable gift, Clara, who grows up to be Greta Thunberg, defeats the forces of Machiavellian duplicity and in the transformation scene the Christmas tree grows and multiplies as a symbol of reforestation. However, the melting ice caps of Lev Ivanov’s snow scene at the end of Act 1 are a stark reminder of the current state of our natural environment. 

Traveling into the second act on board her tiny carbon footprint, Clara visits first Spain for the climate conference and then some of the more flagrant polluters: Russia, China and (Saudi) Arabia. Three of the divertissements from the original second act are thus accounted for — along with possible lead roles and narratives — without the need for cultural exaggeration. The European community is the network of 28 (at this time of writing) countries under the skirts of Mother Ginger Brussels while the Mirlitons as the LGBTQ+ community continue campaigning for human rights. Clara has one last dream of saving the planet in a Waltz of the Flowers seen through the eyes of Extinction Rebellion before the Grand Pas de Deux features the President and First Lady of the United States against a backdrop of Thunberg as Person of the Year on the cover of Time Magazine. 

Drawn in Colour, Degas from the Burrell

Drawn in Colour, Degas from the Burrell, National Gallery, September 18.

Edgar Degas, Preparation for the Class about 1877 Pastel on paper, The Burrell Collection

As a dancer I have for many years felt an affinity for the works of Edgar Degas who for the last 20 years of his life found an enduring subject in the dancers and dance culture of Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. The current exhibition at the National Gallery, Drawn in Colour, Degas from the Burrell, marks the centenary of Degas’ death on September 27, 1917, and is loaned for the most part from the Burrell Collection in Glasgow while its permanent home undergoes refurbishment. Drawn in Colour, curated by Julien Domercq, also includes works from the National Gallery’s own collection.

Degas’ drawings, paintings and pastels of dancers, some of which form part of the exhibition, are inured in the practice and performance of ballet at the Opéra Garnier in Paris. He was born too late (1834) to know the height of romantic ballet in the city but before he died, although his health was frail and his eyesight poor, he attended the first performances in Paris of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1909. (There are two pastels in the exhibition called simply Russian Dancers, dated 1899, which are, according to Alexandre Benois, figures from the Russian folk dance or Hopak, in Fokine’s ballet Le Festin at that 1909 performance).

Since Degas died during the First World War his estate was auctioned in Paris before the war ended. Maynard Keynes, then a humble Treasury adviser but also a keen art collector, used funds borrowed from the United States for the war effort to send himself and the then director of the National Gallery, Sir Charles Holmes, to Paris to bid on the Degas estate. The sound of the guns could be heard from the auction room but although Keynes and Holmes managed to bring home some works for the national collection, they did not return with any works by the artist himself. Sir William Burrell had already started collecting Degas around 1910, amassing 22 works by the time he gifted them, with his entire collection, to the city of Glasgow in 1944. All 22 are assembled in this exhibition, the first time they have been seen together outside Glasgow.

The exhibition is divided into three rooms organized around the themes of Modern Life, Dancers, and Private Worlds; Degas’ interest in the new middle class preoccupations with horse racing (Longchamp held its first race in 1857) and with ballet at the Opéra Garnier (opened in 1875) coincided with his interest in the passing gesture, in traces of movement, in the unique framing of subjects that sits somewhere between the Japanese print and the photographic snapshot and, it is evident, in his love of the intimacy and sensuality of the female form. Degas might have been a photographer — he became proficient in the use of a camera that he purchased in 1895 — but drawing and painting in colour was his particular medium. He sometimes merged the two techniques as in an oil painting, After the Bath, from 1896, which he painted from one of his own photographs. Perhaps I am imagining it, but while its sensuality of form is as equally present as in the bathers drawn from life on the same wall, its flatness of plane belongs more to the nature of the photograph than to the directness of the artist’s own eye.

It is in his use of pastels that Degas found a medium that most successfully united his emotions, his eye and his subject, an effervescence of cross-hatched lines and colour that extend beyond the subjects themselves to express both a sense of movement and his feelings towards them. Red is a tone that is particularly evident in this collection of works, from the red hair of many of his dancers and their tulle skirts to the orgy of red that is the National Gallery’s own Combing the Hair (1896). All the paintings in the exhibition focus on the female form, either at work (Laundresses, 1882-4), at leisure (At the Jewellers, about 1887), dancers rehearsing (Dancers on a Bench, 1898) or preparing their toilette (Woman in a Tub, 1896-1901). If one is prepared to allow this sensuality to arise from the canvas, then Degas, Drawn in Colour allows us behind the eyes and into the life of a famously protective artist; if not, the ‘shocking voyeurism’ of which he is accused by reviewers like Rachel Spence in the Financial Times (writing about the parallel Degas: A Passion for Perfection at the Fitzwilliam Museum) becomes an excuse to use his work as a keyhole through which to observe the private life of the artist.

Drawn in Colour, Degas from the Burrell is at The National Gallery until May 7, 2018. Admission free, donations welcome.