The Show Must Go On (Finale)

Note: You’ll probably want to read Parts 1 and 2 before this one, if you haven’t already.

As we head into the final chapter of Stomach Bug Nut(cracker), or, as I have recently been reminded that some called it, The Pukecracker, I’d like to apologize for the multiple installments. I’m usually not a fan of people drawing things out unnecessarily, as it seems somewhat manipulative (ex. The Hobbit movies). And when I started to tell this story, I really thought it would be one post. But then it seemed like it was getting a little long for a simple blog post, and I was only through dress rehearsal and one performance, so I decided it could be two posts…which has now turned into three. If you’ve hung in for all three installments, thank you, and know that I wasn’t intentionally setting out to manipulatively string you along.

Our last chapter opens with the third and final performance, a school show for a packed auditorium of 1,300 elementary children on Monday morning at 10:00 am. Madeline, our Clara, was still not well, but was also still determined to perform. Some of the child performers who were ill Friday and Saturday were recovered and back for the school show. However, each of the student groups in the cast – Party Children, Toy Soldiers, Clowns, Pastry Chefs, Baby Mice (three-year-olds) and Gingerbread Cookies (four-year-olds) who were all also Gumdrops – were all missing dancers due to illness. And the virus had now climbed its way up the ranks to the company dancers.

The messages started coming in early, mostly of the “she (or he – we did have six young men in the company at the time) isn’t feeling great, but she/he wants to give it a try” variety. However, Carol’s mom called, and told me there was no way she was going to make it. She’d been vomiting all night and was too weak to even try. Carol was a Mouse, and in Snow, Arabian, Mirlitons, and Flowers. And we were a small student company with everyone doing multiple roles; understudies really weren’t a thing.

As we headed into warm-up class on stage, we already had the trash cans placed right off stage again, and I told the dancers to do as much as possible to get warm, but to not tax themselves too much if their stomachs were queasy. “Luckily,” I told them, “it’s the school show. Maybe the kids won’t notice the holes where Carol should be too much.” Immediately following warm-up, we figured out fixes for a few places in Snow and Flowers where Carol’s absence would absolutely be noticed, and reassigned some things in the Battle Scene to cover her there as well. Mirlitons would be a duet instead of a trio. That left Arabian – a pas de deux that year.

I had already changed the order of the divertissements that year from the traditional, due to casting and costume-change needs, and there just was not anyone available to go in for Carol. But we couldn’t cut Arabian from the show, again due to quick-change needs. That left me having the following discussion with Carol’s partner, my oldest godson Charles, age 15:

Penny (just slightly worriedly): “Do you think you can go out and improvise during Arabian?”

Charles (confidently, since he’d been doing improv since he started walking): “Sure!”

Penny: “Just keep it in the character of the choreography as much as you can. Maybe try this (demonstrating some move in the family of what is generally considered “Arabian” in ballet’s Nutcracker culture), and then you could do something like this (another Arabian-ish move).”

Charles (unfazed): “Yeah, okay…I think I’ll be fine. I have some ideas.”*

Penny (distracted by some other mini-crisis involving an absent cast member): “All right, I’ll be in the wing during it if you need moral support.”

If it’s not already obvious, I trusted Charles on stage completely. He’d been dancing as long as he could walk, had been on stage since he was three (as one of the first Baby Mice in my Nutcracker production), was a veteran of The Living Room Improv Show with his two brothers, and was also already an award-winning choreographer.

We survived Act I. Madeline/Clara still made some surreptitious exits to stand over a trash can, and the battle was even more chaotic than choreographed due to missing participants. But the student audience was really into it, laughing when appropriate and enthusiastically applauding and yelling “Bravo!” At intermission, I was told that a couple of the company dancers who had been queasy earlier had graduated to actually being sick, but were going to push through. I remember thinking to myself, “One more act; we can do this.”

We launched into Act II. When it was time for Arabian, Charles entered the stage with a very sultry serious walk, and off he went. Truly, he was amazing, and I don’t think I’m being biased when I say that. He used the full stage space, kept the movement in the right vein, and kept 1,300 elementary kids engaged through the entire dance…all four and half minutes.

At one point, a bit past halfway through, Charles had moved downstage center, rolled to the floor and onto his knees. He then slid into the splits – and the audience “oohed” loudly and began to applaud. He then rolled out of the splits and came up onto his knees again, facing directly into the down right wing, where I was standing just offstage. He reached his arms out and over his head, bringing them down in prayer position in front of his chest, head bowed. He then lifted his head and looked right at me. His eyes were bugged wide and he had a slightly panic-stricken look on his face, but then he arched back into a gorgeous cambre, maintaining his prayer hands and looking up into the line sets overhead. He held there for a long moment, long enough that I thought “Oh, no…is he starting to lose it?” But then he came up from the arch, and continued on, finishing the dance to thunderous applause and screams from the kids.

We made it through the rest of the ballet, with multiple dancers now making use of the trash cans in the wings. We got the ballet loaded out of the theater, loaded into storage at the studio, and were heading into the post-performance crash when I thought of Charles’ performance in Arabian. I asked him “That moment, when you were on your knees and you looked at me, what were you thinking?”

He looked over at me with the funniest expression on his face and he said “Well, first, all the way through I was thinking What does Carol do when we’re not partnering? So, at one point I thought Oh, she does the splits…and so I started into the splits, and was halfway down before I remembered I can’t do the splits! But then I kept going, and made it down and was excited, but then distracted by the kids yelling in the audience, and then my mind went blank, and all I could think when I came up on my knees was This dance is SO LONG…I’ve never noticed how long it is…dear God, please let this be over soon. That’s what I was thinking.”

I lost it completely, dissolving into (maybe somewhat hysterical) laughter. And this has been a go-to story every since. And that concludes the epic tale of the Stomach Bug Nut, aka The Pukecracker.

*”I have some ideas” is a famous Charles quote. I’ll expand on that in a future post. 🙂

The Show Must Go On (Part 2)

Note: If you haven’t read Part 1, you should do that before diving into Part 2.

Where were we? Oh, yes, Sunday of Stomach Bug Nut(cracker) weekend. We had a matinee at 2:00 pm on Sunday, typically getting to the theater around 11:00 am to make sure that everything was prepped and ready for the performance. The calls, emails, and texts started coming in that morning around 9:00 am.

I truly can’t remember exactly how many cast members were sick that day. But I do remember having a quick Battle Scene rehearsal before the show because we were down some Toy Soldiers, and my Battle Scene was very interactive, with hand-to-hand combat moments between the Mice and Soldiers. So it wasn’t just a “we’ll have 10 soldiers in the line instead of 12” situation. The troops had to be rallied to step up for their fallen comrades.

The company dancers, teens who did most of the dancing roles – Snow, Flowers, and the Act II divertissements – were all still hanging on, no major worries there. However, I got a phone call from Clara’s mom…THE Clara, to be clear, the main character of The Nutcracker who is on stage through almost all of the ballet, that Clara…not just some student named Clara. The role of Clara was danced that year by my student, Madeline, and her mom, Terrica, was a friend of mine. Our conversation went something like this:

Penny: “Hello!”

Terrica: “Penny, it’s me…Madeline is not feeling very well. She hasn’t thrown up or anything, but her stomach isn’t great.”

Penny: “Oh, no! Do I need to call Kristin, let them know we may need Chelsea to fill in?” (Chelsea had performed Clara the year before.)

Terrica: “Madeline is absolutely determined to perform, so we will be there. I just wanted to give you a heads up.”

Penny (ending the call): “We’re going to need to put big trash cans right off stage, on both sides.”

We did, and Madeline made it most of the way through the Act I Party Scene before she had to sneak off stage to make use of one of them. When she exited after the Party Scene to change costumes into her nightgown before the Battle Scene, I asked her if she was okay to keep going. She nodded firmly, and I talked her through some of the moments she could sneak off if necessary in the battle and same for the Snow Scene. She nodded again, took a deep breath, and went back on stage. She made it the rest of the way through Act I, strategically timing her vomiting (off stage, in one of the trash cans) for after she’d helped the Nutcracker Prince vanquish the King Rat and was just supposed to be watching the Snow Queen and King dance.

At intermission, I checked in again. “The hardest part is over,” she said. “Once I get through the pantomime, I just sit on the throne.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess you could ask your Prince to escort you to the trash can, if you need to.”

She did.

There’s one more performance left, a show on Monday morning for 1,300 area school children. Part 3 coming soon.

The Show Must Go On (Part 1)

You might think the title of today’s musings is a general reference to our current state of affairs, but I’ve chosen instead to go in the direction of something a little more specific, and hopefully humorous, because I think we all need a little levity right now. It is virus-related, but not COVID-19.

This post is about Western Oklahoma Ballet Theatre’s Nutcracker 2005, or as those of us involved refer to it, Stomach Bug Nut. Some background: WOBT was a pre-professional ballet company that I directed for many years, and we presented three performances of the full-length Nutcracker each December. The majority of the performers were students, ages three to adolescent; there were a few adults in our party scene, and we hired a professional couple to perform both the Snow and Sugar Plum pas de deux.

The story begins at our one and only tech/dress rehearsal in the theater space, the Fine Arts Center of Southwestern Oklahoma State University, on Friday night of Nutcracker weekend. My youngest students, the three-year-olds, were cast as Baby Mice. Their job was to carry the extra-long tail of the King Rat during his grand entrance, and then chase the Owl across the stage two times. They wore tiny gray unitards with mouse tails attached, and cute gray ears, and were adorable. They had just been brought backstage by our mom volunteers, and were sitting in a circle for a few minutes before their first entrance when all of a sudden one of them vomits right into the center of the circle. The moms handled it quickly, cleaning up the mess, bundling the sick child away to go home, and calming down the other kids so they could get on stage. Dress rehearsal continued, and by the end of the night, the sick child was just a small blip amidst all the other rehearsal happenings.

The Saturday of Nutcracker weekend was spent addressing all the production notes from the previous night’s rehearsal – costume, prop, and scenery fixes, lighting cues updated, etc. – in time for the opening performance at 8 pm. Late that afternoon, I received a couple of messages: the first, that the child that had been sick the night before was feeling better, but not ready to be on stage; the second, that another of the Baby Mice was sick and would not make it to the performance either. So, we headed into the performance with only six Baby Mice, instead of eight…no problem. Act I proceeds as rehearsed, and we’re halfway there.

The three-year-olds, in addition to being Baby Mice, were also cast as Gumdrops with the four-year-olds. In my production, Gumdrops appeared in the opening of Act II, to welcome Clara to the Kingdom of the Sweets. As Clara relayed in pantomime the story of how she came to the Kingdom with the Nutcracker Prince, the Gumdrops were seated in three small groups – one near each downstage wing, and one upstage center by the throne. As Clara was finishing her tale with a dramatic demonstration of how the Prince stabbed the King Rat, one of the Gumdrops near the downstage right wing began to throw up…on stage.

I stage managed the production, and that was the wing I stood in to do so. When I realized what was happening – because, let’s face it, once the Gumdrops were safely sitting down, my attention went elsewhere – I ushered the little group (one crying and four grossed out Gumdrops) off stage. “We have vomit ON STAGE, down right, we need a mop right now!” I called into the headset, and then I manically gestured to the dancers on stage beginning to exit “Use the second wing, second wing!” so that they wouldn’t run through the puke.

One of the university crew members finally appeared with a yellow plastic bucket of water and a mop, and tried to give it to me. Here is how our conversation went:

Penny: “Um, no, I’m managing a show here, you have to do it.”

Crew Member: “What? How?”

Penny (looking aggravated, I’m sure): “You are just going to have to mop up the vomit as discreetly as possible from the wing. Now.”

I moved into the second wing, because there was actually still a ballet happening on stage, so what happened next has been described to me by others:

I didn’t even realize anything had happened, and then all of a sudden, a mop comes from the wing, plop!, onto the floor, and is slowly dragged back off-stage. Then again, plop! and drag…plop! and drag. All the way through the Arabian dance.

Several audience members

About halfway through Arabian, I picked Carol up over my shoulder, and began walking backward on the diagonal. That’s the first time we really faced stage right in the dance…and that’s when I saw the mop, coming on stage and then getting pulled off, over and over.

Charles Martin, dancer

We made it through the rest of the show with no more incidents..but the weekend had just begun. Part 2 coming soon.

Creativity takes Courage

The above, a quote from artist Henri Matisse, are words that have encouraged and bolstered me through my working life in the world of dance. Whether teaching, choreographing, rehearsing, or engaging in the administrative tasks necessary to support all the artistic endeavors, these words have often helped me as I approached new projects or difficult tasks. They endowed me with a sense of optimism, a belief that I not only would survive the process but grow from it, as long as I had the courage to 1) begin and 2) work with openness to my creative instincts.

As we are faced with isolation and uncertainty in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are all being forced to adjust not only our social lives, but our work habits as well. However, those of us in dance and other performing arts are particularly affected, because our work is extraordinarily communal in nature, involving groups of people coming together to create dance, play music, or present theater, in front of an audience. On top of the economic anxiety brought on by not being able to work and the fears for arts organizations being faced with devastating financial losses due to cancelled performances and closed schools, how do we cope with the loss of the sense of togetherness and community that our work routinely brings?

People are trying to fill the void via social media and online content – videos of performances, streaming classes, and uplifting projects like this one here https://www.facebook.com/AlvinAileyAmericanDanceTheater/videos/203773687564296/ from the dancers of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The website Dancing Alone Together https://www.dancingalonetogether.org/ was created with the goal of being a central resource for the new and growing digital dance world.

All of this is important and necessary as we learn to navigate these uncharted waters. And I have been telling my students for years how lucky they are that they live in the internet age, because when I was a young dance student in rural Clinton, Oklahoma obsessed with all things ballet, books and Dance Magazine were my only resources. “I had photos,” I tell my kids, “you can watch Marianela Núñez any time you want on YouTube.” But video is not the same as attending a live performance, or being in the studio with your teacher and your fellow dancers. And I hope we remember that when we come out on the other side of this crisis.

It’s going to take creativity and courage to get through this. This blog is going to be one of my outlets during social isolation. I don’t really know where it will go, although it will be centered around dance. Faced with too much time on my hands, and worried about what the future will hold, I decided to 1) begin and 2) work with openness to my creative instincts.

Courage to us all.