"Nutcracker" features Ukrainian dancers (01/11/98)

"Nutcracker" features Ukrainian dancers

by Christopher Guly

OTTAWA - Every Christmas season, somewhere in Canada, a local theater presents "The Nutcracker." This year, three cities got to see the production in the tradition of the man whose music accompanies the ballet. Edmonton-based Sulyma Productions Inc. has assembled dancers from the Ukrainian Shumka Dancers to join the Kyiv Ballet of the National Opera of Ukraine to stage the fantasy ballet set to the sounds of 19th century Ukrainian-Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

The production opened on December 3, 1997, for a four-day run at the National Arts Center in Ottawa and moved on to the Living Arts Center in the Toronto-area city of Mississauga, on December 9-17, and the River Run Center in the southwestern Ontario city of Guelph, from December 19 to 21.

Choreographer John Pichlyk, who also serves as artistic director of Shumka, has created a Ukrainian-influenced version of "The Nutcracker" relying on the century-old tradition of the Kyiv Ballet, which premiered Tchaikovsky's tragic opera, "The Oprichnik," in 1874. Though steeped in the classical Russian ballet technique, the Kyiv Ballet began staging works by Ukrainian composers as early as the 1920s such as "Lileia" (The Lily) by Kostiantyn Dankevych.

The Ukrainian Canadian influence on the production comes through Shumka (which means "whirlwind" in Ukrainian), the 38-year-old dance company based in Edmonton, the members of which collaborated with the Kyiv Ballet's decade-long artistic director, Victor Litvinov, during their 1995 "Absolutely Shumka" Canadian tour.

The Ukrainian "Nutcracker" also features costume and set designs by Maria Levitskaya, who studied at the Art Institute in Kyiv and has served as director of stage design at the National Opera since 1989. One of her most recent productions was Tchaikovsky's "Sleeping Beauty." Michael Sulyma, who previously assembled three variety specials on Shumka for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's television network, serves as the show's producer.

"The Nutcracker" premiered at the Mariyinskyi Theatre in St. Petersburg on December 18, 1892. Marius Petipa, who collaborated with Tchaikovsky the previous year on "Sleeping Beauty," was commissioned to choreograph the new work.

Written by German orchestral conductor E.T.A. Hoffman, original "The Nutcracker" tale tells the story of Maria Stahlbaum who receives a Nutcracker doll from her godfather, the mysterious Dr. Drosselmeier, who tells the little girl the story about the prince transformed into a nutcracker by the evil mouse queen. The spell, Maria is told, can only be broken by the love of young girl.

When Maria falls asleep that Christmas Eve she dreams about a prince until she is awakened by the booming tones of the midnight clock. Suddenly, the room is transformed into a fantasy world of mice, and the Nutcracker, who having become a dashing young prince, whisks Maria off to his palace. When she awakes from her reverie, Maria is lying on the parlor sofa, clutching the magical nutcracker.

While being presented in Canada as a truly Ukrainian production, "The Nutcracker" has received various interpretations over the years, including a Freudian staging of the ballet by Rudolf Nureyev for the Royal Swedish Ballet in 1966, another psychological take on the story by Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1976 and the replacement of the tale's German household by a Russian village by the National Ballet of Canada's Slavic-descended artistic director, James Kudelka, two years ago. The most famous use of Tchaikovsky's score appeared in Walt Disney's 1941 full-length feature cartoon "Fantasia."