The Unbearable Whiteness of "The Nutcracker"

I was to a live performance of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker on Sunday and, of course, the lead child actors were black. And there were a couple of blacks in the corps de ballet.

But, sensitized as I am to all matters racial and cultural, I gotta say: The Nutcracker is as white as white can be. The first act takes place at a Christmas party in a very haute bourgeois household. And the girls get nice dollies as presents and the boys get to act like boys, playing at soldiers, and ambushing the girls as they play with their dollies.

Then, in the second act, we get a prime example of Edward Said's Orientalism, or non-European as exotic. Strictly speaking, we are talking about various sweets in the Land of the Sweets. So there is Spanish Chocolate, Arabian Coffee, Chinese Tea, Russian Candy Cane. Then Mother Ginger and Marzipan.

Yes, but whatabout South Asian Spice, and African fruits? How come they don't get a dance? Raciss!

The other takeaway for me, now I am so sensitized to everything, is that ballet, at its high noon with the classic Tchaikovsky ballets, is nothing but a display of the female form. The pas de deux seems to be designed to show off the prima ballerina's legs. The corps de ballet is a throng of pubescent girls fluttering around. The tutu is, again, displaying the legs of the female dancer.

And so on.

So I went and looked up ballet at La Wik. It started in the courts of the Italian Renaissance, featuring noble amateur dancers, and then spread to France with Catherine de Medici. It reached its peak under Louis XIV with a formal court ballet with a court ballet master and the five positions. Then it declined after 1830 in France until revived by the Russians. I seem to remember reading that in Paris, the ballet dancers of the Paris Opera were "available" to the various rich patrons.

I was reading about how San Francisco's Great Dickens Christmas Fair has descended into racial madness. It seems that some nice black ladies got involved and then brought their race politics with them. They want racial quotas for everything except that BIPOC characters can only be represented by BIPOC people.

I dare say that the same thing will soon apply to ballet and the Xmas Nutcrackers that are featured every Christmas in all our major cities.

It's amusing, really. Because ballet is such a whitey-white thing (as is Dickens). Everyone wants in on the white things, and then they want to bring their anti-white racism with them.

If I may be permitted to extend the dance metaphor just one step more...

Don't you realize you wokies and BIPOCs and all the ships at sea? You are not dancing to your own authentic dance tradition. You are dancing like marionettes, and ruling-class educated white liberals are pulling the strings.

And as I say with my Little Darlings notion, One Fine Day you will wake up and find the bed empty, because your ruling class Sugar Daddy has found a new Little Darling to pamper and exploit.