I LIKE TO THINK ABOUT...THE AMERICAN OBSESSION

Tis the season to go watch The Nutcracker Ballet! I just saw the NCDT performance last night and loved it so much more than usual...the dancers were amazing. Absolutely amazing. I was a dancer a long time ago and performed in the ballet twice as a rat and babushka, which gives me a very exciting view of the performance. A good dancer is a good dancer, but it's interesting to focus on why they're a good dancer. The main "point" being that the dance must look effortless. Absolutely effortless.
My question though is, why is The Nutcracker so popular in America? It isn't this popular anywhere else in the world. As you may have guessed, and or heard, NPR asked this question on their show On Point.
Here's an essay that I wrote to describe my experience as an aspiring ballerina.

Where We Danced

The majority of my young life was spent in a tutu; it was pink with glitter and rhinestones that left tornadoes of sparkles behind me when I twirled. And I twirled often; I trained for ten years at the School of the North Carolina Dance Theater with a dream to become a professional, nine-to-five dancer. My first ballet was The Nutcracker, which my parents and I went to see when I was at the tender age of two. According to my mom, at the end of the performance I yelled, clapped, and waved my stuffed animals in the air with glee; the next day I was signed up for a dance class. After ten years of ballet, I sit in the studio and watch the professional perform- but now I know that dancing isn’t all gum drops and sugar plum fairies.
I began my training at the age of three with Ms. Sabrina, a young modern dancer with a large tolerance for children. At three you don’t so much as dance, but run amuck in wild circles of twinkles, and spin so fast that your hair pins fly out. Ms. Sabrina would put on a song and tell us to be amoebas wriggling on the floor; then she would say, “Be tigers!” We’d growl at each other and put our tutus around our faces because we were kids and that’s what kids do.
After class, my classmates and I would walk out into the lobby and eat our dinner where we could watch the trained dancers in the main studio. They would leap and twirl effortlessly with grace and precision before landing on the box of their point shoes, which struck the mat with a dull thud. The music would reverberate through the studios grey walls and grey floor, over the hum of the air conditioning and motherly chitchat. Our minds were off in a cloud of lollipops and candy-canes, where we were prima ballerinas and playing lead in The Nutcracker. Just like professionals, our point shoes would drum to Tchaikovsky and we would leap into the air in the white tutu of the sugar plum fairy.
As you rise threw the ranks of a ballet school, the list of restrictions and regulations grows longer and longer. Our pretty pink tutus were no longer allowed and all of our leotards, tights, hair, and shoes were the same. We’d sit in the lobby watching the professional dancers as our mothers made our buns- a complex routine involving hair nets and a massive amount of bobby pins. They’d mist halos of hair spray above our heads that would cover the room in a sticky fog. By the end of the ritual, our hair was pulled back so tightly that we couldn’t move our eyebrows from a state of perpetual surprise. Suddenly, ballet was no longer fun and games, but a lot of work. Facing the mirror in a group of blue clad dancers, we mimicked each other as the music played on. Like little blue robots, we’d wined up and do our dance to the beat of the song and the insistent clapping of our instructor’s hands.
This rigorous schedule followed us into Ballet two and our new red leotards, but now we were at the studio ten hours a week. We wound up, repeating the dances over and over and over again. The buns, that we worked so hard to perfect, ejected bobby pins from our hair during pirouettes. Our legs bent and our slippers scampered to keep up with the music; after every exercise we would lean against the beams in exhaustion. Yet with all of our suffering, we still repeated the routines and suffered the pain because it would be worth it when we could dance like the professionals.
We thought this until our point shoes came in; those shimmering rectangular shoes became the symbol of our pain and misery. To wear a point shoe you have to prepare your feet by clipping your toe-nails, covering them in wool, using band aids, or gel pads- anything to keep the pain away. It was the pain of watching a girl drilling her toes into the floor, and the sound of bullets that it made as she scurried across the mat. And it was a searing pain on the top of your toe as if you’d stayed by the fire too long, but also a pinching pain that cramped your feet and sent spasms threw your legs.
We ended class in the lobby among the toddlers and professionals removing our musty shoes and sweat soaked wrapping to care for our feet. By the end of the first month, I’d lost both of my little toe-nails to large blue bruises that dotted the tips of my toes on both feet. Blisters had formed and popped; some of them large and bulbuls with puss and others heated and red. Being a nine-to-five dancer was no longer appealing, and the last thing I could imagine was jamming my feet into those satin traps every day.
Sitting in the studio now, among the grey walls, the smog of hair spray, and the fumes of tortured feet, I don’t regret quitting. Still, there is a tug in my gut every year when we go to see The Nutcracker. I watch the ballerinas in white tutus twirl on their point shoes; they effortlessly jump into the air and gallop across the stage at the beat of the conductors wand. I clap and yell and cheer for the dancers at curtain call, the same as when I was young. And sometimes I think that maybe, just maybe, I could be a ballerina too.