Nut/Cracked

Like the best Monty Python sketch, David Parker’s Nut/Cracked is all about making the familiar strange. Toe shoes? Ho-hum. But set them in motion on a dark stage with a dancer (Jaimi Patterson) holding a flashlight, and they become ghostly and charming. Or put them on someone hands and feet, and an all-fours creep across the stage becomes otherworldly—like a Calder sculpture come to life.
    As Elizabeth Johnson’s dance troupe Your Mother Dances has discovered, it’s the perfect antidote to Holiday blandness, honoring the “tradition” of The Nutcracker, but turning it into something fresh and funny. Last weekend, the familiar became very strange and alive. And very funny.
    Tired of the “ethnic” dances in Act Two? Turn the “Chinese Tea” into a duet in which the man (Luc Vanier) slurps a long noodle en pointe while his partner (Christal Wagner) dances. Tired of those Russians? See their high kicks in a different way as the dancers perform them lying on the floor.
    Your Mother Dances performed excerpts from Nut/Cracked last year, but this year they tackled the whole shebang. With an hour of delights and surprises, Parker’s sense of fun and invention is exhaustive. And exhausting. Tap-dancing in toe shoes is no easy feat, but Vanier makes it seem like a romp. Parker puts his waltzing snowflakes on an imaginary sheet of ice, and the pratfalls are both hilarious and (I’m sure) butt-bruising. And the complicated, limb-tangling partnering of “Rose” (the “Snow” Pas de Deux turned into a tango-inspired, competitive Pas de Trois featuring Vanier, Johnson and Wagner) requires a whole Twister-tournament’s-worth of bends that only a chiropractor could love.
    Nut/Cracked is a big project for this small, scrappy company. But it’s the kind of smart, cool event that could, and should, become an untraditional holiday tradition.