"Urban Nutcracker" Comes Full Circle
Ballet master Tony Williams greets the 8th annual presentation of his re-imagining of Tchaikovsky’s classic with undiminished enthusiasm. The secret to his passion in staging Tony Williams’ Urban Nutcracker is proclaimed in the very title of the dance theater piece. Not only is he the producer and director, but his dance celebration of Boston’s cultural diversity is highly autobiographical.
A Black Heritage
In a sense, "Tony Williams’s Urban Nutcracker" comes full circle. "The Nutcracker," a fairy tale ballet in two acts, three scenes by Pyotr Ilyvich Tchaikovsky, was based on a story by a writer who, like Tony, had a mixed race parentage. Tony’s dad, a black American, met and married his mom while based as a serviceman in Italy. The famous French author Alexandre Dumas, pere, ("The Three Musketeers," "The Count of Monte Cristo") was the grandson of a nobleman who while living in Haiti had a child with an Afro Caribbean former slave Marie-Cesette. Their son, Dumas’s father, was a general in Napoleon’s army. The story-line for "The Nutcracker" is an adaptation by E.T.A. Hoffman of a story by Dumas "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King." The ballet was first performed Dec. 18, 1892 but the complete ballet did not achieve its great popularity until around the mid-1960s. The ballet received a second infusion of a black sensibility when Duke Ellington with Billy Strayhorn wrote a whimsical jazz "Nutcracker Suite" based on Tchaikovsky’s ballet in 1960.
The eagerly anticipated "Tony Williams’ Urban Nutcracker" opens Dec. 5 with performances through Dec. 21. at John Hancock Hall, 180 Clarendon St. in the Copley Sq. neighborhood of downtown Boston. For more info you can go on-line to balletrox.org.
One of the distinctive scenes that sets this Nutcracker apart from any other is the Prologue, which simulates holiday shoppers on a street in Roxbury. As part of the backdrop, you’ll notice a pudding stone wall reminiscent of the one up the street at Horatio Harris Park (formerly Fountain Square), a block or so from where Tony’s family lived. One of the hurrying figures in the bustle of last minute shopping is a young boy dragging a red cart, very like the one Tony and other young teens parked at the local super market near Bromley Heath when the family relocated there; the "hustle" of those times was to drag groceries home for shoppers for a quarter tip.
A Dancer’s Passion
In addition to the doo wop singers led by the G-Clef singer Ilanga and the hip hop dancers, there is always a dance "face off" in the Prologue. This year that number sees the return to the show of Roxbury son tap dancer Khalid Hill, now of Brooklyn, whose training at Andrea Herbert’s Roxbury Center for the Performing Arts prepared him for a Broadway’s "Bring On Da Noise, Bring on Da Funk." Hill, who was in earlier "Nutcracker" productions, will battle an Irish step dancer. (Last year’s competitive dancing was between a hoofer and a flamengo dancer).
This competition recalls the very emergence of tap around 1841 when William Henry Lane aka Master Juba, reputedly the best dancer anyone had ever seen, had a cutting session in Boston with Irishman Jack Diamond, also a top dog in the dance world of the time. It’s not recorded who won that match, probably because they both claimed the honor.
Williams himself danced in the first "Nutcracker" staged by the Boston Ballet in Boston in 1965 in a theater on Massachusetts Avenue between Huntington and Boylston since demolished. (Williams was the first African-American Boston Ballet member.) Arthur Fieldler conducted. "It was a big success," recalls Williams, now the head of Ballet Rox school for dance which stages his "Urban Nutcracker."
"Here I was a kid from the projects, a teenager, and I had a talent that was a ticket to ride. Coming from a family of nine with an alcoholic father performing in a ballet from the courts of French kings," he says.
The heady experience has stayed with him, as was the passion he felt for dance and saw that the other dancers felt as well. Now he sees that excitement in the children at his school as they prepare to be in the show. Some 85 of them will dance in "Tony Williams’ Urban Nutcracker" this year alone.
"They so look forward to being in the ’Nutcracker," says Williams. "And I get excited that the children are from such diverse backgrounds, such different walks of life. And they all want to be a part of it. I feel it’s a force I’ve unleashed. Vicariously, I am reliving the time when I was a young person. Reliving that time through their enthusiasm."
