The Nutcracker

          GNO lead donor

GNO Ballet Director Konstantinos Rigos is revisiting The Nutcracker with a view to further elaborating the choreography he first presented in 2022. Indeed, his borderline obsessive engagement with his favourite composer –Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky– has produced numerous renderings over the course of his artistic career.

In this take on The Nutcracker, Rigos views the work from the perspective of children who find themselves pushed to the margins and forced to forge their own dreams in a world “wrecked by grown-ups”. The stage set for this production is a glass room –a kind of display case– inside which Marie-Clara dreams away, going on a journey through the imagination. The production’s Christmas tree is a plastic miniature set inside this glass case of a room – Marie-Clara sees the real tree only on a screen. This Gen Z Nutcracker walks the line between contemporary visuals and classical dance traditions. The costumes by Deux Hommes are a colourful and impressive mix of pop and glam haute couture pieces, national costumes, and fabrics inspired by past GNO productions.

“Christmas Eve finds Marie-Clara opening presents from her godfather to discover a strange toy: her beloved Nutcracker. Inside her delicate childhood world, dreams and reality sweetly intertwine. In the arms of her Nutcracker, she is to experience the most amazing dreams – but also the most terrifying nightmares. Drawing on a new era, the GNO Ballet’s Nutcracker foregrounds the dark as much as the bright and spectacular aspects of this famous fairy tale. A strange new world is forged on stage, in which Marie-Clara’s glass case of a room encounters the colourful, radiant objects that hover over the stage and the baroque portals that lead down into the subterranean depths of the Mouse Kingdom, but also the brilliantly-lit Christmas tree,” notes Rigos.

The Nutcracker is rightly considered one of the most popular ballets in the repertoire since the emotional power and theatricality of Tchaikovsky’s music never fails to captivate audiences, enchanting both young and old alike. In its initial two-act form, choreographed by Lev Ivanov and with a libretto by Marius Petipa on the basis of which Tchaikovsky composed his music, The Nutcracker was first presented at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg on 18 December 1892. The original plot is based on the E.T.A. Hoffmann story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.