AVA'S FIRST NUTCRACKER

 
- Liane Weintraub, Editor-in-Chief

My daughter’s first ballet performance … I’ve been waiting for this moment for 3 ½ years! 

Actually, come to think of it, it’s been a lot longer than that.  I’ve probably been dreaming of this for most of my adult life.

When I was a child, ballet was everything to me.  I don’t remember the precise moment when I witnessed my first “real” ballet (although it was undoubtedly the New York City Ballet company, and probably “The Nutcracker”), but from a very early age, the world of ballet came to represent everything beautiful and special for me, as it has for little girls through the ages.

Like many lucky young girls, I took ballet lessons.  Although all the doting adults around me told me that I was a beautiful dancer, I’m certain that I never showed any true talent beyond what any half-way coordinated youngster might have, but their praise still meant the world to me.  It made me see myself as a girl who could embody that grace and nobility that I saw in ballerinas, and it made me aspire to something greater than what I saw in the everyday world around me.  Somehow, having ballet in my life heightened everything.  I was quite devoted to my ballet studies, attending class several times a week, performing in lots of recitals and eventually graduating to “pointe” shoes.  I quit at the age of 13, when my teacher moved out of the country, but by then I was already a head taller than any ballerina I’d heard of, and I accepted the fact that my love of dance would probably be best lived from the audience than from the stage.  I wasn’t bitter at all – I was simply more of a balletomane than a ballerina.

I was lucky in that I grew up in a city that’s one of the world’s Meccas of dance (and all the arts, for that matter), and even luckier to have a mother who took me to performances regularly.  She filled many of my weekends with matinee performances of all kinds, from live theater to symphony music – but the ballet was always my favorite.  There is something so ethereal about dance, and to me it seemed less demanding than watching a play, but more complete than hearing symphony music.  I’ve always been stimulated visually, so music without dance didn’t compute in my mind; everything I know about classical music, I learned from watching ballets.

But enough about ancient history …

When I gave birth to Ava, I received no fewer than 10 baby-sized tutus from friends who knew what dance means to me.  She was a ballerina for her first Halloween, at the tender age of 4
months, and the photos of her as a baby, dressed in tulle, and propped up on a pillow with a tiara balanced on her virtually-bald head are hilarious. But I never wanted to foist ballet on her.  When she showed only marginal interest in a Mommy & Me ballet class, I stopped taking her.

The last thing I wanted to do was force her to do something just because I had loved it as a child … we’ve all heard horror stories about those kinds of mothers, right?!

But when she turned 3, Ava started wanting to wear tutus.  She asked to go to dance class.  I played it cool, but I was thrilled!  Cautiously, I showed her a DVD of my all-time-favorite childhood ballet, the New York City Ballet’s “The Nutcracker,” choreographed by George Balanchine, my great hero (but that’s for another blog one day).  And, lo and behold, she loved it!  We watched the movie over and over and, just like I did (as does everyone who grew up on Balanchine’s version), Ava calls the child star Marie, instead of Clara.  It makes me smile when she insists on that name.  She tells anyone who will listen to her that she loves Tchaikovsky’s music (she pronounces it “Shyskosky,” but for a 3-year-old, that still gets people’s attention!)

I bought tickets for a live performance and, in 3 ½ years of “firsts,” this was one of the most meaningful “firsts” in her life … at least it was for me!  In my eyes, this outing represented a powerful mother-daughter bonding moment, and a figurative passing of the baton.  I’m not certain the impact was as great for my child.  She was riveted through the first half, but elected to go home at intermission, which is pretty understandable for someone whose usual nap-time coincides with the matinee performance time.  She slept the whole way home.  Were visions of Sugar Plum fairies dancing in her head?  I don’t know.  Time will tell.  But for me, it was magical, none-the-less.