Fokine family Nutcrackers: a trio of productions shows holiday favorite's Russian roots.

The overture to The Nutcracker is playing, and I know every note. I am onstage with four other dancers, with that delicious feeling that the magic is about to begin. Finally we hear the opening strains of the first act, with its pleasantly simmering music, and the curtain opens, finding President and Mme. Silberhaus, Clara and Fritz, and their maid (me) decorating the tree. I've worked hard all year to get the parts I want, and have spent every Saturday and Sunday for months rehearsing at the studio of the Irine Fokine School of Ballet in New Jersey. I love this ballet.

Irine Fokine, niece of the great choreographer Michel Fokine, produces her forty-fifth Nutcracker this December. With a cast of sixty students and a handful of guest artists, the ballet is a major cultural event in northern New Jersey. Through her mother, Alexandra Fedorova (see page 62), her Nutcracker traces a direct line to the original Ivanov/Petipa production in 1892 in St. Petersburg. And, keeping it all in the family, her daughters, Nina Marlow and Donna Decker, produce sister Nutcrackers in other parts of the country.

Fokine performed in her first Nutcracker as a child, playing one of the Nutcracker's sisters, but she barely remembers it. The production she does remember was at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, where her mother had staged a one-act version for Serge Denham's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1940.

Her first reaction was awe at seeing Igor Youskevitch dance. "I was a kid, sitting with my mouth open, and completely in love with him. For me, nobody else matters, never did, never will."

Fokine went to work on her own production in 1957, seven years after she opened her school in Ridgewood, New Jersey. "I went right by the score. I remembered so much of it. I probably asked my mother questions." Not everyone was thrilled with the project. "A good friend said, `Why are you doing that? It will never go.' And it went for forty-five years !" Fokine has kept it basically as she learned it from the Ballet Russe, but makes small changes every year. "I try to polish it, add a little bit of this and subtract that. It has become cleaner and better."

The grand pas de deux, however, is sacred. "The Sugar Plum is as exact as I could get it. This I don't change," she proclaimed. She has kept the swooning climax, when the Cavalier rocks the arched Sugar Plum Fairy like a pendulum, the back of her head almost sweeping the floor.

In order to maintain a high technical caliber, Fokine has always hired a professional male dancer for the Cavalier and "Snow" roles. About fifteen years ago, she also hired a guest female dancer for the Sugar Plum Fairy. For the last several years, the lead couple has been Slawomir Wozniak, a principal dancer with Poland's National Ballet in Warsaw, and Kat Wildish, a former dancer with both American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet who now teaches at Broadway Dance Center. Others who have guested include Alexander Filipov, Ted Kivitt, Ali Pourfarrokh, and William Forsythe.

A high point of her show is Mother Ginger. Played as a flamboyant drag act by Andrew Wentink, who is also a dance historian and archivist, the role has developed into a hilarious scene over the last twenty-one years. He goads the Polichinelles to be naughty and outwit her, and when they are dancing politely downstage, he swirls his gigantic skirt upstage as though carried away with the music. At the end they rush to her and brazenly rustle her skirts. Says Wentink, "To keep myself interested, I started adding things, and Irine let me do it. Mother Ginger has become a real character who interacts with the Polichinelles. It makes them perform better because, at that age, if they ever have a chance to steal the show, that's the number to do it in."

Fokine, 80, still teaches at least ten classes a week and swims daily. After forty-five years of Nutcracker, she has the rehearsal schedule down to a science. The students audition in early October (in my day, we didn't have to audition), and the cast spends the better part of every weekend until December at the studio. She uses the older girls to teach and help organize the younger ones, and the whole thing takes eighty-four hours.

For many, The Nutcracker is a family affair. But the Fokine Nutcracker adds new meaning to that adage: Fokine's two daughters run their own Nutcrackers, cut from the same cloth as hers, and since their production dates are staggered, they are able to share resources and guest artists.

Nina Marlow of the Nina Marlow School of Ballet in Phoenix, Arizona, started her Nutcracker seventeen years ago. And Donna Decker of the Donna Decker School of Ballet, with studios in Norwich and Oneonta in upstate New York, has been producing hers for fourteen years. Nina danced the Snow Queen and "Waltz of the Flowers" lead in her mother's production; Donna, in her own words, was "a Polichinelle forever" but also danced Chinese and Mirliton.

Decker said, "I respect my mother's Nutcracker too much to change anything. Her first act is the best I've ever seen. The story just comes across." She enjoys their exchange on a practical level too. "Mom uses my Mother Ginger costume every year, and I borrow her men's costumes for Spanish and Arabian."

Fokine said, "When they were both starting, I would get those crazy calls: "Ma, how do you make the Nutcracker's head? Ma, what goes first, this or that?"

What puts the icing on the cake of the family affair is Drosselmeyer, who is played by Fokine's son, Jon Decker, in all three productions. A carpenter by day, he's been playing the eccentric uncle in his mother's Nutcracker intermittently since he was a teenager. At 56, balding and bearded, he has, shall we say, grown into the role. "I don't have to put on a bald wig or big whiskers any more," he said with Drosselmeyeran glee. He's so at home in the role that he uses it to liven up people onstage. "I have an array of things--a number of spiders and flies. I have a third eye that goes on the crown of my head. People standing behind me see it, and it gets a bit of a start out of them. When I kiss the hand of a lady, I might bite her knuckles. One time I grabbed a lady's ring and slipped it off her finger before she realized what I'd done," he chuckled. "She was in a fret for the whole first act."

Since Decker is usually called in only for dress rehearsal at all three Nutcrackers, he is not immune to mistakes. "I get them all mixed up after a while. I've caught myself walking in the wrong direction at times."

Donna Decker is delighted by his last-minute appearances. "My children are terrified of him because they see him only in full makeup. They say, `Oh my God, that's your brother?' They don't even have to act onstage. He comes on, and they are scared."

Like any dance teacher, Marlow appreciates the help of her community. "Half the people who help us backstage have kids who are long since grown--we have some of their grandchildren. One man whose daughter left a long time ago still does spotlight and helps lay the floor."

In this three-pack version of The Nutcracker, Drosselmeyer has the last word. "I gesture to Clara and the Sugar Plum," Jon Decker explained. "Then I gesture to the audience, and I point to my head as if it's all in your head, all in a dream."

The ballet is nearly over. I'm sweating from the finale and still have bits of plastic snow stuck to my neck and shoulders. I join the line of dancers that encircles the last tableau. Step hmm hmm, stop hmm hmm, step hmm hmm, stop hmm hmm. I am floating on the music, Tchaikovsky's lullaby transporting me to even sweeter lands. A wave of nostalgia and gratitude washes over me. I love this ballet.

RELATED ARTICLE: Alexandra Fedorova: pipeline to Petipa.

Alexandra Fedorova graduated from the Imperial Ballet School in 1902, in the same class as Tamara Karsavina. Her Nutcracker connection may have started as early as the late 1890s; her daughter, Irine Fokine, says she was a bee in the Petipa/Ivanov production (which premiered in 1892) at the Maryinsky. Anna Pavlova, who was three years ahead of her, had been assigned to her as an older "sister," which meant Fedorova got to sew the ribbons on the older girl's pointe shoes. She adored Pavlova and was thrilled when she was chosen to dance with her in a special performance for the czar. One of the older boys was Michel Fokine, whose brother, Alexander, she met and married.

As a soloist with the Maryinsky Ballet, she became known for her exceptional technique, with a side extension almost Up to her ear (still in evidence in her 70s) and tiny, strong feet that could go up on pointe in soft shoes. She often took time off to dance in her husband's Troitzky Theatre in St. Petersburg, and, as a result, was dismissed from the Maryinsky. She danced briefly with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1909, performing in Les Sylphides (then called Chopiniana).

In the 1920s Fedorova worked as lead dancer and choreographer with the Riga Opera Ballet in Latvia, staging many ballets, including Coppelia, Swan Lake, and Firebird. Often her son, Leon, would come to Riga to dance opposite her. In 1928 Leon left for the United States; Fedorova, with 15-year-old Irine in tow, followed nine years later, after her husband died. Settling in Manhattan, she became a popular ballet teacher (see "From Artist to Student," Dance Magazine, May 1954, page 27), eventually counting among her students Robert Joffrey, Gerald Arpino, Nora Kaye, Donald Saddler, Gower Champion, and Eugene Loring.

Fedorova was regarded as an invaluable link to Petipa and Ivanov. (When Joffrey launched his new Nutcracker in 1987, the program note read: "After the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo 1940 production that was revived by Alexandra Fedorova from the original Petipa/Ivanov production for the Maryinsky Ballet.") Serge Denham, director of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, asked her to stage a one-act Nutcracker for his company, which traveled all over the United States. (The Nutcracker was not originally a holiday ballet; it was performed in Russia at all times of the year.) Fedorova's version of The Nutcracker introduced the holiday classic to American audiences. Premiered in October 1940, it had a short party scene, one child, no mice, and only one soldier. It toured as repertoire with the Ballet Russe in a program with a one-act Swan Lake, also staged by Fedorova, and Schdherazade, by her brother-in-law, Michel Fokine. This mixed bill, dubbed "ham and eggs" by the dancers, was very popular and stayed in the repertoire until the company disbanded in 1962. Longtime Ballet Russe principal dancer Frederic Franklin said, "Whenever we needed money, we did `ham and eggs.'"

The high point of the show, as Franklin remembers it, was the Russian dance. "I did the trepak," Franklin recalled. "Four boys started in first, with clapping and stamping, and then I rushed onto the stage with lots of split leaps.... On opening night, I stopped the show. Alicia Markova and Andre Eglevsky [who danced the Sugar Plum pas de deux] were very upset."

As the Ballet Russe traveled to different cities, it would find young girls to play Clara. One was Maureen Reagan (yes, the former president's daughter). Another was Lili Cockerille (now Livingston), whose first ballet teachers were Leon and his wife, Gloria Fokine, in Washington, D.C., and who later danced with the Harkness Ballet. The author of American Indian Ballerinas, Livingston recalls the elderly Fedorova vividly from the 1950s: "Madame was as sweet as could be, but tough as nails. Like Danilova, there was a magic. She had an incredibly straight back, but it was flexible too; it would just melt. Her arms moved like water. She would say, `I do, you do,' meaning `If I can do it, you can do it.'" --Wendy Perron 

For more information:

The One and Only: The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo by Jack Anderson. New York: Dance Horizons. 1981. 333 pages, illustrations. Out of print, but available at www.amazon.com. ASIN: 0871271273. Paperback reissue edition also available from Amazon, ISBN: 090310265X

Wendy Perron, the New York editor of Dance Magazine, danced in Irine Fokine's Nutcracker from 1957 to 1964.