I WONDER how many parents wanted to turn back the clock at the Connaught Theatre — and went away wishing when they were young they had been offered the chance to become fully part of an English Youth Ballet production.
Hundreds watched their children undergoing that experience during the four performances and many will have realised they had missed the boat.
Choreographer and former Royal Ballet dancer Janet Lewis tours her EYB company around nearly 30 venues, a
nd rehearses from each provincial theatre region hundreds of child dancers to take part. These are not gratuitous by-standing parts in classical ballets, as commonly incorporated by some touring companies after brief preparation, but children actually doing the dances after strenuous, prolonged and dedicated preparation.
Lewis has invented a touring ballet school and her 2008 New Year's Honours List MBE testified to the importance and rarity of this. And following her visit EYB with Coppelia two years ago, here they were, back and rejoicing in another classic that lends itself even more widely to the purpose.
The Nutcracker Act 1 has a children's Christmas Eve party, a midnight battle between soldiers and rats, and more than a flurry of human snowflakes. Act 2 features a parade of national or themed dances. Lewis has the children doing almost the lot, to her own choreography.
All she has to add are six professionals to cover the main parts (two party-hosting parents, a Snow Queen and Prince, a Nutcracker Prince, a Sugar Plum Fairy, and the intriguing Drosselmeyer), plus a seventh for the "adult" Arabian dance and a student as the older child Clara, and she has a production.
The 85 child dancers, from eight to 18, rehearsed for 10 days at Boundstone Community College. They came from a radius from Southsea and Liphook in the West, through Worthing and Steyning to Brighton in the east. In that area there is a lot of dance teaching going on.
And Lewis' professionals proved top-notch. Add the help from her production team, to the local assistance in rehearsal transport and front-of-house presentation, and this is an operation in which any degree of success has already been described by the word "miraculous".
And it is not just kids "having a go". The whole thing has to be convincing and the EYB tuition and training, added to the work of local teachers and schools, ensures there is all to admire, praise, and most of all, enjoy.
The logic of having small girls attempting the coquettish Spanish Dance of Act 2 will miss the mark in authenticity — but then again, this was an event in a child's dream (probably . . .) so licence is earned from the neutral onlooker, and the girls' parents are not about to grumble.
Apart from, arguably, the demanding Trepak, none of the other divertissement dances suffered for juvenility and Tchaikowsky, had he been alive to see it all, would have felt beside himself in fulfilment.
There are simply too many names to single any out. And no one young child's achievement in dancing their ensemble part is any lesser an achievement than an older one's triumph as, say, the Nutcracker soldier or Clara's brother Fritz.
When it came to the adult set-pieces there was nothing lacking.
I saw Oliver Speers as an electrifyingly long, graceful and athletically elevating Nutcracker Prince, and in grand pas de deux with Julianne Rice-Oxley, whose liquid smooth and effortlessly-balanced multiple fouettes were a clinching factor. Speers upped his attack by Lewis purloining one of the Swan Lake Act 3 solos for his first variation.
I liked Snow Queen Emma Lister's slightly jerky moves and her partnership with Snow Prince, Lorien Slaughter, ensured both main pairings on the night had stature. Young Ellie Warner's Clara was all wide-eyes but perfect in classical poise.
The sashes of petit fours around the Pan-piping Merlitons, cast as French Reed pipers, were a costuming highlight from Keith Bish. Lewis was not at all short of local boys at this production but her Trepak was, for a change, from peasant girls.
Rice-Oxley, also the EYB ballet mistress, and Lister made significant choreographic contributions and Lewis' assistant artistic director Dominic Marshall restaging deserves high praise.
Dancing is dancing, but Act 1 is always the yardstick.
Is there a sense of anticipation and yuletide frisson? Is there mystery? Is there fear? Is there a genuine battle? Yes, yes, yes and yes — in capital letters.
And what of Drosselmeyer? The imposing Kasper Cornish, more comfortably cast this time than as Franz in Coppelia, came openly as a godfather with a repertoire of magician's tricks.
But the idea of him preparing his own performing dolls made for an arresting Overture and their reception by the children at the party deepened the wonder and surprise. Signs he gave later during the act, after nightfall, especially his appearance on the tower of the grandfather clock, furthered his dimension.
You must never be sure what is real in Act 1. It should be on another plane, and hardly ever were this audience broken from the spell cast to applaud a set dance. They were absorbed and enveloped, many mesmerised by their first Nutcracker, and this EYB Act 1 compares strongly with any I have seen for imagination and ideas.
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