A magical new Nutcracker from English National Ballet

The reason? A brand new Nutcracker was reaching its final stages and its main architects, ENB artistic director Aaron S Watkin and the young much in-demand choreographer Arielle Smith were all smiles and nervous energy when they met me to talk about it.

More than any other ballet, The Nutcracker is a ritual, a sure harbinger of Christmas. For many children it’s the first ballet they’ll be taken to as a special Christmas treat; adults, too, love to relive the childish wonderment The Nutcracker created in their younger selves.

And for most ballet companies, The Nutcracker is a key part of their repertoire, the audience magnet that will finance the rest of the season; ENB, though, was painfully aware of the deficiencies of its previous, muddled Nutcracker. . So much so that, Aaron S Watkin recalls,

‘When I was applying for the job and when I got it, one of the questions that came up right away was “would you be interested to have a new Nutcracker?”

Yes, of course he was, but not in his first season, 2023/24, though even as he was getting his feet under the desk, as it were, thoughts for an ambitious new, very ENB Nutcracker must have been bubbling away in his mind.

ENB Nutcracker - Aaron S Warkin rehearsing with the company

‘We were looking for something that appeals to children, something that’s fresh. A large part of our audience has seen a traditional Nutcracker and we want to keep them on board, but there’s a huge part of our audience that has never seen a classical ballet before.

‘We’re in London where there’s only so much people can take in; so, if someone’s going to come and see a production these days, with a limited budget, there needs to be a reason why they think that production is going to be special.’

ENB's 'special' new Nutcracker is very much a collaborative venture: Arielle Smith, whose previous work for ENB, Jolly Folly, won an Olivier Award, is sharing choreographic duties with Watkin himself. The veteran designer Dick Bird created the luscious sets and costumes for Edwardian London in Act I and a magical dream world in Act II, but is credited with collaborating on the concept, ‘almost like a dramaturg’ in Watkin’s words.

The plot follows the lines originally devised by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa in late 19h century Russia: Act I is a Christmas Eve party in a bourgeois family’s home, where the child Clara is given a nutcracker doll by the mysterious Drosselmeyer; Act II is set in the magical Land of Sweets of Clara’s dream, where, accompanied by her magically transformed nutcracker prince, she watches a series of divertissements.

But whereas,

‘the first act was originally seen as all story and no dance, and the second Act all dance and no story’,

as Watkin puts it, ENB’s new Nutcracker aims

‘to make it all come to life and be more cohesive, so that there’s a relatability between Acts I and II’.

That means that all the characters we see in Act II have already appeared in a different guise in Act I, but are now filtered through Clara’s imagination and inhabit a truly magical, visually stunning world.

Aaron S Watkin is choreographing most of Act II, including the ballet’s most emblematic sequence, the Sugar Plum Fairy pas de deux.

ENB Nutcracker in rehearsal: Sugar Plum Fairy & Cavalier - Emma Hawes and Aitor Arrieta

Arielle Smith has been charged with devising a livelier Act I, as well as contributing a few of the Act II divertissements. Arguing that this production begs for two different choreographic voices - Watkin’s more classical, her own more physical – Arielle Smith says of her Act I:

‘There are various different sections within the party scene. Rather than doing one long scene, within that there are different sides and stories, different people, and they should have their own identity. There’s so much happening it’s almost like performances within performances.’

This production starts with a brand new scene: walking through the busy streets of London, peopled by chimney sweeps, suffragettes and all sorts of other people, Clara and her mother visit "Drosselmeyer’s Sweets and Delights Emporium", where they buy sweets for the party. These are the sweets that will manifest in Act II, replacing the usual national dances, which had become controversial of late amid accusations of disrespectful cultural appropriation.

ENB’s Nutcracker elegantly sidesteps the controversy by going back to basics, as Aaron S Watkin explains:

‘We were researching things and we read back to the original synopsis of Petipa - it said these were sweets from different lands, so the focus was actually on the sweets, not on national dance.

‘We wanted to make it more about finding an authentic sweet from those lands. And so, from Spain it’s "turrón". A Chinese person when they see "tanghulu', which is basically sugar-covered candied fruit on a stick, will recognise it immediately.

‘We found a wonderful drink called "sachlav', which is basically a hot chocolate from the Middle East that they drink in winter and it’s made from orchid roots with pistachios and cinnamon sticks. So, the female dancer is the liquid and the two men are the cinnamon sticks. She gets pulled out of a silver cup, and she has liquid sort of wings, she’s making liquid shapes.’

ENB Nutcracker Rehearsals - Emily Suzuki and Vsevolod Maievskyi and Jose María Lorca Menchón

As for the child Clara, she is performed by two different dancers. Arielle Smith explains the logic behind it:

‘Clara in real life is a child, but when she goes to sleep she sees herself in the dream as older.’

‘Clara is our protagonist and the story is told through her imagination’, Aaron S Watkin elaborates. ‘When she escapes into her dream world, she’s on a journey of discovery where everything is possible for her. So, she is actively leading that, she is not following like in a lot of versions. I think when she comes back to reality it’s the confidence that she’s found, what she discovers, that she takes forward into the real world.’

Drosselmeyer is a character Smith loved ‘to play with’:

‘He’s been fleshed out quite a lot - he moves a bit more in terms of choreography. He actually becomes almost a narrator and a master of ceremonies for our audience.’

Beyond that, Watkins adds,

‘He’s also an eccentric sorcerer type that makes enchanted toys - he has a toy for each person. The nutcracker is something for Clara to discover, and if she can unlock that, she then unlocks all the possibilities of his masterplan.’

For the dancers, too, these are heady times, says Arielle Smith:

“I have worked here before and the dancers are real assets for the company and I think that this production showcases their ability as dancers. No role in this production is a small role. Earlier Francesca [Velicu] came up to me and said, “I’ve never been so excited”’.

ENB Nutcracker in rehearsal

Ultimately, and beyond what he is sure will be a fabulous new version of the Christmas ballet, Aaron S Watkin is excited about the impact of this big project on the company as a whole.

‘Coming in as a new Artistic Director, I see this as something made for our whole company. And not only the dancers; if you hear our HR people, daily ops, everyone is so excited.

‘We can be proud of something that we all made together, the power of the collective. We did a run through today of Act II and it was really nice watching them watch each other and it just felt so inspiring.’

English National Ballet's Nutcracker premieres in Southampton on 28 November; and comes to the London Coliseum 12 December - 12 January 2025. Full info and tickets here