Late in the afternoon on the Saturday before New Ballet Ensemble is
scheduled to perform its unorthodox version of The Nutcracker at
the Germantown Performing Arts Centre, Katie Smythe, the company’s
founding director, sweeps through the group’s spectacularly renovated
Cooper-Young headquarters, rounding up dancers, musicians, and teachers
and assembling them for a progress report. Once everyone has settled,
Smythe steps into the center of the large, mirror-lined room and makes
a series of stern pronouncements, reminding her performers that they
are only one week away from their big night and that there are
important transitions that have yet to be properly rehearsed.
Smythe looks like a dancer. She’s petite, with delicate features
that belie the 47-year-old’s toughness as an instructor. “We’re only
supposed to rehearse until 5 p.m. today,” she says. “It’s already after
4 p.m. and everybody’s tired and looking a little pale. Before we do
anything else, I think we all need to do an African warm-up.”
A jolt of happy electricity crackles through the room, as her
dancers immediately line up in neat even rows and prepare to exercise.
A pair of dreadlocked men take their place at drums in the front of the
studio and start hammering out a hypnotic, tribal rhythm.
The company begins a precise and vigorous game of follow the leader,
starting with gentle stretches that gradually evolve into dance
movements, as the sound of the drums grows louder, transporting the
dancers to another plane of consciousness.
It’s unlikely that any student of dance could watch this sweaty
scene and guess that the company was preparing to perform Tchaikovsky’s
famous holiday ballet — or something very much like it.
But challenging expectations is exactly what the dancers of New Ballet
Ensemble want to do, and for all of its classical underpinnings NBE’s
Nut Re-Mix is a far cry from the ballet that has charmed
audiences for generations. This version — which has evolved over
the past seven seasons — is set in Memphis, not Germany, and it
samples Duke Ellington and brings in contemporary dance beats as the
choreography shifts from sugarplum sweet to old-school street.
The dancers and instructors at New Ballet Ensemble want to reshape
what you think you know about classical dance. Since its founding in
2001, the school’s mission has been to unite children from diverse
ethnic and economic backgrounds and provide them with a professional
standard of training from age 5 to age 18, regardless of a student’s
ability to pay. It’s an ambitious goal that dovetails with the
company’s desire to develop unique danceworks that fuse classic ballet
with hip-hop, modern, and traditional forms from around the globe
— and to build an ensemble that looks, sounds, and, most
importantly, moves in a way that reflects Memphis’ unique culture.
Although it was composed at the end of the 19th century, annual
holiday performances of The Nutcracker are a relatively modern
phenomenon. Tchaikovsky didn’t particularly care for the work, and
while the Nutcracker Suite — a shorter concert version of
the work — became immediately popular, the complete ballet was
performed infrequently until the mid-1950s. Now it ranks among the most
popular and frequently performed works in the classical canon.
The Nutcracker‘s story and its structure have been altered
many times. In recent years, some wild productions have cropped up,
including Mark Morris’ Hard Nut, a campy and occasionally
terrifying reinvention that owes as much to the underground comics of
Charles Burns as it does to Tchaikovsky. In 2000, choreographerr
Maurice Béjart staged an even more controversial, highly
sexualized version that replaced the original cast of characters with
Freudian archetypess, the Christian devil, and Felix the Cat. NBE’s
Nut Re-Mix is tame in comparison but no less original.
“It’s the most original version of The Nutcracker I’ve ever
done,” says NBE guest artist General McArthur Hambrick. Hambrick, a
veteran of Minnesota Dance Theatre, has performed on Broadway in
Cats and Miss Saigon and recently in a revival of Martha
Clarke’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Hambrick has been involved
in more versions of The Nutcracker than he cares to remember,
but he says the Memphis production is unique because of its use of
hip-hop, its international flavor, and the diversity of the ensemble
— a multigenerational mix of company dancers, drummers, and
students from Midtown, downtown, East Memphis, and Orange Mound.
“It is very unusual to work with this kind of group,” Hambrick
says.
Following the original story, NBE’s Nut is centered around
Clara, a young girl who falls asleep on Christmas Eve and has a
fanciful dream that culminates with a fierce battle between a handsome
soldier and the Rat King and his army. Smythe has set NBE’s version on
Beale Street, where revelers party, vendors hock their wares, and kids
execute gravity-defying flips for pocket change on a night when a
grounded international flight brings people from many lands into the
same cafe. Tchaikovsky’s original score includes sections inspired by
Chinese, Spanish, Russian, and Arabian folk music, but Nut
Re-Mix also includes dynamic selections based on African and
Caribbean dance.
“Everybody likes to think they’ve come up with an original idea,”
Smythe says. “But when you really think about it, not very much is all
that original, is it?”
And in fact, teaching ballet to students regardless of their ability
to pay is a Smythe family tradition. Her paternal grandmother, Mary
Clay Tate, was a ballerina who danced with the Chicago Lyric Opera
before returning to her home in Memphis and marrying William Hamilton
Smythe Jr., who sang in barbershop quartets and loved vaudeville. In
the 1920s, William worked as a mortgage banker, and Mary taught
dance.
“But when the Great Depression hit, nobody could afford to pay for
ballet lessons,” Smythe says. To compensate, her grandfather installed
barres in the couple’s Midtown house, and when students came over, her
grandmother would roll up the carpets and teach dance for a dime. “Or
whatever you could afford,” Smythe says. “And if you didn’t have enough
money for food, you could stay for dinner.”
Smythe, who took her first dance lessons from her grandmother, took
the family’s stories to heart. Today, 54 percent of the students in
NBE’s core program come from minority groups and often enter the school
through programs like the Orange Mound Dance Experience and CityDance,
a free summer workshop sponsored by Nike. Thanks to scholarships and
grants, more than 40 percent of NBE’s students study at no cost to
their families.
Smythe, a Central High graduate with 30 years of professional
experience as a dancer, describes herself as a “bridge builder.”
Although her work hasn’t gotten any easier, she laughs when she recalls
how all the “bun-heads” (her ballet students) tried to run away when
she first called on them to learn hip-hop.
“They were so afraid they would look stupid,” Smythe says. “So I
told them, ‘Well, think about how all the members of the [hip-hop] crew
stepped up to the [ballet] barre.'”
She describes those early mixers as a test of everybody’s patience.
Some white parents feared getting out of their cars when black students
were present, and many black students perceived displays of authority
by a white instructor as racism. Today, three students from the
original Yo! Memphis program are company members.
In addition to taking ballet programs like the company’s Peter
and the Wolf workshop into Memphis schools, NBE tours a show called
From Hip Hop to Africa: The Roots of Urban Dance, which
illustrates the relationship of African dance to modern urban dance and
traces steps from New Guinea to Brooklyn, Memphis, and beyond.
“We try to find what I call equalizers,” says Smythe, whose ballet
and hip-hop students are also exposed to modern dance, as well as
traditional Spanish and Asian forms through company members like Noelia
Garcia Carmona, who danced professionally across Europe and China after
graduating from the Institut del Theatre i Dansa de Barcelona. The
ultimate goal, Smythe says, is “raising the capacity of all, so that we
no longer recognize our differences.”
Of course, NBE’s free tuition isn’t really free. Bridge-building is
expensive, and the turbulent recent economy has created an especially
nervous time for not-for-profit arts organizations. “People think that
because they give to ArtsMemphis, they are supporting New Ballet
Ensemble. And they are. But they may see ArtsMemphis on our program and
assume, ‘Oh, these guys are fully funded.’ In reality, we only receive
$4,000 annually from ArtsMemphis. That’s only 1 percent of our
operating budget.”
Smythe is clearly grateful for that 1 percent and for ArtsMemphis’
generous capital gift sponsoring NBE’s Cooper-Young community dance
studio. She worries, however, that potential donors may not understand
that ArtsMemphis funding is only part of the equation.
NBE has developed a handful of corporate partnerships but relies
heavily on private donations and grants. “Some of the little girls my
grandmother taught at her house on Vinton have become wonderful
donors,” Smythe says. “Of course, they aren’t little girls
anymore.”
General McArthur Hambrick’s arrival in Memphis last week was
upstaged by the delivery of a large box from China. And while Hambrick,
whose name generally ensures he’s never upstaged, began his first
workout in NBE’s main studio, dancer Chris Roberts, a human spring
known for his leaps and his skills at blending hip-hop and techno with
classical forms, was tearing into the box and removing its colorful
contents.
“God, this smells like a sweat factory,” he said, pulling out the
giant head of a traditional Chinese Lion costume. Roberts’ mother works
as a ribbon designer for Sun Rich Asia and spends six months a year in
China. The eight-part costume for two is an elaborate hybrid, part
clothing, part puppet. Within minutes, Roberts and a partner have put
the entire thing on and are prancing around the room, blinking the
lion’s eyes, wiggling its ears, and stopping occasionally to scratch
imaginary fleas with the fringe-laden hind legs.
Two days later, during a large group rehearsal, the duo made the
lion moonwalk across the main studio floor, while other dancers twirled
parasols and waved fans or ribbons. The moonwalk was spontaneous and
not officially a part of the performance, but it was a beautiful and
surreal reminder of the kinds of surprising things NBE can do.
Roberts, who acquired the lion with help from his mother, had no
classical training before — as he puts it — “Miss Katie
found me.” He says he “didn’t want to have anything to do with tights.”
Roberts started studying jazz and tap in elementary school and worked
as a Libertyland dancer for two summers, while teaching himself hip-hop
basics.
On the last Saturday before the big show, Roberts worked out how to
incorporate his big red lion into Nut Re-Mix’s China sequence,
while ballerinas in pink toe shoes leaned against the barre next to
hip-hop dancers in orange-and-gray ankle boots.
In the neighboring studio, a pair of dancers worked on the ballet’s
Arabian section, while in the ArtsMemphis Community Dance Space, drums
rumbled and whistles sounded as an African dance, using beginning and
intermediate students, started to take shape. It was like the whole
world had come to Cooper-Young. And that whole world was Memphis.
