On December 7 of last year, I fell in love with ballet. I’m in love with the fluttering of feet on a wood floor shimmering in a sphere of orchestral and paper colors; I’m in love with those colors, themselves. Then again, I’ve maintained an infatuation with the orchestral for about a dozen or so years. Adam’s Giselle, Khachaturian’s Spartacus, Stravinsky’s and Tchaikovsky’s great triads—I cherish them all in their aural halves.

But a certain overpopular, overused opus among them—whole, how much more wonderful now. The Nutcracker. I’ve heard its music on cheap headphones and surround-sound stereo speakers—however until said date never live, never put to movement in the fourth dimension. Youtube abounds in audiovisual felicities for those momentarily satisfied with, or for any reason confined to, computer-code amusements. Yet the selfsame site motivates many of its admirers toward performance art centers, sports stadiums, museums, bars, car lots, realtors, airports, cruise ships, beaches, catacombs, for tangible, for “real” experiences. I remember how anxious I myself became, after viewing multiple uploads of Brahms recordings, to give an ovation to an orchestra, in person, for their playing him well. The Phoenix Symphony performance I attended, of his Symphony No. 1, forced me onto my feet in absolute rapture, moving me to believe completely, as I believe few things, that art is best taken entire.

And a live performance of anything is best absorbed from a balcony seat. It cannot feel authentic if it appears as close to the eyes as my computer sits now to mine, which, without optometric help, see the world as a fuzzy place. The farther an object from them, the murkier. It’s completely natural to me, my personal haze, which somewhat obscured the poetic movements of mages, mascots, snowflakes, toys, a prince, a princess, an ecstatic twirling split dove, on the Comerica Theatre stage—yes, it seemed then, rather than impedimentary, of significant physical therefore empirical truth. Not that I am averse—nor did I slip into aversion at any point during the performance—to a quick moment of clarity enabled by a pair of binoculars or prescription lenses offered by a seatmate. Rewards in their greatest variety come to the flexible.

Yes, it is perfectly clear to me just how irrational I am about art. But, of course, it is one of the few of my life’s elements on which I maintain a perspective to which prescription lenses and binoculars are unfavorable, a largely emotional one, which is in no essential way unique; for that I’m sure Moscow Ballet is grateful. I can imagine their being routinely dissatisfied with all responses to their artistic efforts if they only ever performed for masses of Peter Singers and Spinozas. But isn’t the current abundance of such people in our world the very challenge all the arts face? It’s a challenge that I am, for the moment, convinced Tchaikovsky can overcome.

He was the night’s gift to me, this music maker whose sense of the passionate wonder in a child’s mind, likewise an artist’s, infects a child’s and an artist’s imagination. Such, anyway, was the effect his sound seemed to have on every dancer, every player, every member of the juvenile chorus, who appeared intermittently, all singing out throat or feet or fingers with control of but no seeming constraint on their expression—to say nothing about the varied heads in the audience, out which little noise poured all night but ear-shattering enthusiasm.

A fascinating paradox, this guided freedom—shall I call it that? Or abandon with a focus? It is among the greatest paradoxes, in art’s sphere, that find counterparts in the many other spheres coalescing into the all-containing, the human. Yet such freedom, of a both emotional and intellectual kind, seems so elusive in the human sphere that we often deny the possibility of anyone’s ever coming to know it. Tchaikovsky makes, at least once annually—dancers, choreographers, players, conductors, designers, directors, and singers willing—a formal appearance to become the nucleus of a vast, free moment, to give listeners a taste of what it means to orbit an asteroid flying between galaxies.

Few concert or theatre composers now living can make any moment feel vast rather than long. Then there are the most popular heirs to Tchaikovsky’s aesthetic, among whom Star Wars’ John Williams is the most decorated, who repeat Tchaikovsky’s message to us more regularly than Tchaikovsky does himself, but in less profound a way, bound as they are to the second dimension. Even when performed separately from the silver-screen spectacles of which it is designed to exist as part, their music immediately fixes specific celebrity faces—digitally enhanced or, e.g., to my entertainment in Jurassic Park and my nausea in The Phantom Menace, digitally created—along with other programmed images, in a listener’s mind. A groan—I release a little one at the thought of venturing on the mundane; yet I suppose such venturing is inevitable for any mind during meditations like this one on art. That’s another paradox, but a parenthetical one.

Onward. The fact of his heirs’ and their audience’s being—this is a testament to the lastingness of Tchaikovsky’s power, which exists apart from all context created for it yet is also congenial to that context. The dual reason I can think of for The Nutcracker’s music continuing until now, more than just about any movie’s, as open to us, and one reason for our continuing, whether we understand or not, as open to it.   

“Until now.” Don’t I return to it here, and to my December night, during an episode in which such interests are legitimately rarefied? One publishes on these irrationally in a year of quarantines, of economic collapses, of anti-truth propaganda, and of a cry from the world, in deeply felt powerlessness, for a cap on the din of it all. I reveal myself, while talking stillness pleasure and other trivialities of the moment in which I find myself, as nothing but extraordinarily well-practiced in the craft of self-indulgence.

If this is my reader’s opinion, let me feed it some admissions: of an obsession with Victorian hedonism; of passionate, though not quite exclusive, love and admiration for the output of a long-dead throng; of disdain for literary minimalism; of being an Internet-age mystic; of fully believing myself to exist as a product and a perhaps forever unsung figure of twenty-first-century decadence. I don’t deny I am among the few self-aware aesthete-millennials who may actually deserve to be—for our passionate interest and the intrusiveness of our compulsion to express it we often are—infantilized and ignored.

But Tchaikovsky’s children—what do they deserve? The worst of them give me, one of their critical admirers, reason to celebrate my own (moderate and few) creative achievements while the best, like their sublime progenitor, make me question my competence at living. But I can bring myself, as if they are unnecessary, to kill none from either group, because each is a potential outlet for any emotion for which my senses momentarily crave the impression of tangibility. If, e.g., between two-thirty and two-forty in the afternoon I find myself with the urge to circulate a little tragic recalcitrance through my veins, to taste its effect the way I taste a vitamin injection’s, I can stomp crash and spin through Zbigniew Preisner’s Song for the Unification of Europe or a few numbers from the soundtrack of Star Wars: Episode III. If the latter is my choice, I can go on for twenty minutes without noticing my sense for higher art shrinking on my brain.

Shot. I add to “infantilized and ignored” that I am one of the few self-aware aesthete-millennials who may deserve to be shot. Like Daffy Duck. Send my nose and lips around to the other side of my head because I don’t believe, not even during crisis, that all artistic experiences are alike in their completeness and splendor, which is to say in the number of their intricacies and nuances, and in the emotional variety and scope, in the general aesthetic fascination, of the unions they sanction between feelings and forms. I like to think, however, that my ecstatic snobbery is no more intense (and no more irritating) than my teenage, hip-hop-enthusiast neighbor’s. Indeed, aren’t most fans of Kanye West’s Grammy candy rather loud, through and within given walls, about their considering Vince Gill’s candy—equally sweet, according to award numbers—as significantly less interesting in flavor? I side with Gill’s devotees in the universal argument of tastes. I believe the combination of a monotonous conspicuous percussive beat and the absence of melody is a combination elemental to noise-making, not music-making. But, again, parenthesis.

Returning to the children: I count among Tchaikovsky’s heirs his works’ interpreters, including the performers I applauded with shining eyes on my December night. I know without confirmation that my eyes shined like no others in the audience. Was this ecstatic response deserved? I answer, Yes, with absolute conviction, but what really is my believing so? Effulgence is, after all, an interpretation.

Although the general luminous response—I repeat, I heard only bright noise—of the auditorium to Tchaikovsky’s spectacle was symbolized, rather on-the-nose, by the Dove of Peace. This figure is exclusive to Moscow Ballet’s “Great Russian Nutcracker” (their annual production’s formal name). Two dancers, one male one female, each costumed in a shimmering white wing, come together on the stage floor to perform an acrobatic “flight” before the second Act’s national dances. Turning on two talented sets of toes, the creature of their merging resembles Nike at play on water. Its effect is intended as one of unification and purification. Moscow Ballet’s theory is that we are—whatever our separate nations, ideologies, colors, gender identifications—united by art, which suggests that our humanity, or at least our experience of it, is purified by art. Not knowing Moscow Ballet’s political intentions for their dove—not understanding, moreover, the particular difference it constituted of their production from others I might have seen instead—I welcomed into my mind, once the dove appeared, E.T.A Hoffmann’s Nutcracker and the King of Mice. The dove inevitably took on its more ancient metaphor, becoming a soul’s conveyor.    

That soul—there she is, Clara (or Masha, if you like), at the ballet’s Christmas-set opening, twirling a hole into the floor. She sparkles in the spotlight like a fay in a Faberge egg. At some point she drops, invisibly, and a war commences between her toys and a number of graceful militant mice, the king of which sports multiple ornately designed heads. The toys win and become human, breaking the king’s transformative spell. Shortly thereafter, Clara finds herself in the romantic grip of the toys’ leader. As she progresses from girl playing with teddy bears to girl playing with love in a forest haunted by a blizzard queen and singing ice doilies, all worlds gather in her dream. Indeed, Tchaikovsky has done everything possible to convince us that her story’s action takes place nowhere but in her subconscious mind. She wakes at the ballet’s finale from the memory of conflict, having apparently married on the winning side of the contest she has witnessed between powers, a contest that has ended in slaughter. She wakes to the innocence on which time pauses in her toy-stuffed bedroom. Contrary to Hoffmann’s Clara-Masha, who is stolen from the limited and largely odious possibilities of her nineteenth-century future by the wings of the waters and the wild, so that we, her audience, are gifted with a child who will find no dull colors in her ultimate eventuality, nor be burdened with any prophecy concerning our world’s own. Either way, Tchaikovsky’s or Hoffmann’s, universality. Either way—and certainly if both are combined—effulgence.

But who cares who cares who cares who cares who cares? Dead composer; live-in-the-moment cheese; snobbish reviewer; light or whatever the hell—and is that dove really necessary? All my love is with you, reader, but a further interruption will result in my inserting, below, a video of myself beating effigies of Christ, Gandhi, and Tom Hanks with a Reborn baby doll.

Tchaikovsky’s Clara holds tightly onto us as she is taken up—if her dancer’s performance and the performance of the accompanying orchestra are any good. As we spin in her grip, concentrating on her, taking in all the aural and visual textures and the motions literal and musical of her spectacle, we open. Focusing, we become free. Escapism—expel it; hedonism—embrace it; mysticism—let it be the pretension (the art appreciator’s) that teases out associations with the feathers falling about our heads. So classical, these delicate actuators, tiresome on a page, but now we have to clap writhe whistle and weep, because a dozen feelings crave at once to manifest on the skin.

Feelings that darken and elevate. God is here—as long as the orchestra and dancer maintain their footing. But our demons arrive, too. Faith and nonbelief smirk at one another in the clearest moments, when all the arguments in the viewer’s/listener’s mind are collected into the hum between the beauties external and the beauties the external expose that flourish in the mind’s silence. Whether we prefer the ground of the sacred or the ground of the profane, we feel our spirituality or our secularity enriched by the coalescence of all disparate ideas into the coupling of a dance shoe and a violin string.

Ridiculous? Sure, but isn’t it also wonderful? Of course, I’ve left out most of the Moscow Ballet production’s cast and crew, to be listed below. These and all aesthetic heirs of great artists deserve—another of my few hard and genuine beliefs—the completeness of their admirers’ and detractors’ expression, the totality of their momentary interest. Artistic interest continues to be generated daily, to my joy, thanks to the moderators of video sharing sites. Their Dove of Peace is the very ability they’ve gifted the Kanye West fans, the Gill fans, the Tchaikovsky, to gather in interest’s name. Is it sentimental of me to sing like that on the ecstasy of appreciators? Certainly, but why shouldn’t we allow a shot glass or a bucket of sentimental grains to dirty our meditations—indeed, why should we designate sentimentality as, altogether, filth of a kind—while the true dust of our extinction advances, yet the dream of our oneness is alive?       

Cast:

Masha/Nutcracker Prince: Karyna Shatkovskaya/Rustem Imangaliyev, Tatiana Nazarchevici/Nicolai Nazarchevici

Uncle Drosselmeyer: Dmytro Sharai

Mrs and Mayor Stahlbaum: Anna Trofimova/Sviatoslav Kvachuk

Brother Fritz: Ruslan Vovk

Nutcracker Doll: Domenico Napolitano

Harlequin Doll: Vladyslav Stepanov

Kissy Doll: Savina Yelyzaveta

Moor Dolls: Viktoriya Dymovska/Adel Kinzikeev

Rat King: Fedir Zarodyshev

Dove of Peace: Viktoriya Dymovskya/Adel Kinzikeev

Chinese Variation: Anastasiia Haietska/Artyom Deberdeyev

Arabian Variation: Viktoriya Dymovskya/Adel Kinzikeev

French Variation: Karyna Shatkovskaya/Fedir Zarodyshev

Russian Variation: Mihail Botoc

Corps de Ballet: Anna Bielova, Bondar Bohdana, Bogdana Kopiy, Anastasiia Kovalenko, Anastasiia Pravdyva, Anastasiia Romanytska, Viera Tynianova, Elena Zhadan, Sergii Grebelnyk, Ion Mosneaga, Domenico Napolitano, Andre Saharnean, Dymtro Shvets, Anna Trofimova, Mariia Yevdokymova

Orchestra: Student musicians courtesy of Musical Wunderkind

Director and Choreographer: Stanislav Vlasov

Production Designer: Carl Spraque