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THE DANCE ENTHUSIAST ASKS: David Parker on the 22nd Consecutive Season of The Bang Group’s “Nut/Cracked”

David Parker, the visionary choreographer behind Nut/Cracked, has spent over two decades reshaping the holiday classic with his inventive and humorous twist on Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. Presented by The Bang Group, the production seamlessly blends tap, vaudeville, ballet, and contemporary dance with genre-defying creativity. First conceived in 2003, Nut/Cracked has developed into a beloved holiday tradition, offering audiences a playful deconstruction of seasonal tropes. With performances at the 92NY Harkness Dance Center, Parker’s work captures the joy, absurdity, and nostalgia of the holidays through rhythmic innovation and a touch of irreverent charm. The Dance Enthusiast’s Theo Boguszewski speaks with Parker about the evolution of Nut/Cracked, and why it’s become such a cherished tradition. 

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Theo Boguszewski for The Dance Enthusiast: What inspired you to create Nut/Cracked back in 2003, and how did the idea of deconstructing Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker come about?

David Parker: I never thought I would do a Nutcracker of my own. And now it's been 22 years in a row that we've been doing it. In the early 1990s, I was just fooling around with ideas about partnering, unusual ways to form connections with a partner to develop movement. And one of the things we were doing was using thumb sucking, mutual thumb sucking, as an invention for partnering. And I was practicing this with Jeff Kazin, who dances with us. It was during the holiday season and the TV was on in the background and there was Nutcracker music. So we did it to Nutcracker music just for fun. And a little light bulb went off. It was the music for the grand pas de deux, and that something very infantile and soothing would be combined with something grandiose and classical and iconic, somehow melded with my own choreographic sensitivity. So I built a piece just with that one section and we did it all over the place. In Europe it was very popular. In fact, one time, Pina Bausch saw it and spoke to me afterward and said she wished she'd thought of it.

I didn't connect it to any sort of ambition about the whole Nutcracker. But an Italian presenter then invited me to make a whole evening length version of the Nutcracker in the same spirit as that thumb-sucking. I hesitated, but since it was a commission, I thought, I'll try it. And I was at first daunted. I love the Nutcracker, actually. I went to see it often growing up in Boston. But I felt, what did I have to add to it? But upon discovering that there was the Duke Ellington version of the music and also some other vernacular and pop arrangements, I thought, well, seeing as I'm a rhythm oriented choreographer, if I start with those pieces of music, it really gives me an entry point. And I liked the music and what was happening, and I decided that I would tackle more of the traditional orchestral suite as we all recognize it. So I blended the regular Tchaikovsky traditional version and some jazz and pop arrangements.

And I thought I would just go right for the essence of what the winter holidays have meant to us in American culture and in dance culture. Because there's really no place besides the United States where the Nutcracker is so unavoidable. It's the one ballet that most Americans have seen. So I decided to dispense with the story and present it as a vaudeville. The thing that made Christmas exciting to me as a child was the constant anticipation and the idea that the presents you would get would somehow transform you into an ideal version of yourself. So I organized the show around that. It's about 20 sections, 20 different kinds of presents which have relevance for dancers and which allow us to transform something about ourselves; pointe shoes, a sheet of bubble wrap which allows us to make sounds like tap dancing, top hats that allow us to transform into vaudevillians. So it just grew from there. It took about four years for it to more or less take the form that it exists in now. And it’s been an uninterrupted 22 year run.

Do you perform in the production?

I still perform in it. There are three of us from the original show, and we actually did it even in a truncated version with masks on in a studio during the pandemic. We didn't even miss that one year. I think there are 14 adults in it now, and we also have children who are middle school to early high school age from the 92nd Street Y dance Education Lab.

You mentioned that it took four years to kind of get to its current iteration. Has it evolved since then?

It has. The initial version from 2003 had only five people in it, and it was the same length as it is now. In 2005, I was invited by Barnard College, where I taught at that time, to create a section for a large number of dancers. So I chose the Waltz of the Snowflakes as a way to use the opportunity to deal with a lot of dancers in space. And that was so successful that we reintegrated that into the show. And so things like that. It got blown up in size and density, and I kept adding touches to existing sections. So it was like it was an outline in 2003, and it gradually got filled in layer by layer for the next few years.

Do you have to bring in additional dancers, or is it just your company?

Yes. Every year we bring in additional dancers because I normally work with just six dancers year round, and for this show, we at least double that. The pool of dancers from which we draw, many of them have been in it for 10 years, even though they don't work with me year round, they come back for this show. So there's a sense of community in the show because we all know each other.

Walk us through the different spaces you’ve been in over the years. 

We've been in many spaces. Initially it was commissioned by the Carlo Felice Opera House in Genoa, but it was a co-commission with Dance Theater Workshop which is now New York Live Arts. I think we did four years as NYLA and 4 years as DTW. We’ve done it in several countries; Italy, Scotland, Belgium, and in about 14 states. We've also had 10 productions in Boston. We also do it every year in Maine at a theater in Kittery. And so we’re doing it there this year at the Harkness Dance Center at the 92nd Street Y, at the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park and at the National Arts Club.

For those who aren't familiar with your work, can you walk us through the various influences that surface in this production? 

Yeah. I have forged my own path in that sense. I have an equally active history in percussive dance, tap dance, postmodern dance, and experimental dance. So I have a very broad based dance background and training. And I've never chosen one lane. I choreograph rhythmically primarily, no matter what the form is, whether it's barefoot or in toe shoes or in tap shoes. And that's the common underlying thread.

And there's also a tendency for the dances — I don't know how this happens, honestly — to be funny, to be humorous. It just seems to happen, I can't always control it. And during the early years, I think I was one of the people who was doing a lot more what we would now call “queer inflected work” — exploring intimate relationships between men in various ways. I didn't do it with any political agenda in mind. It was more to reflect my own experience. 30, 35 years ago that was more unusual. Now it's entirely integrated into a very wholesome idea of what dance can be, which is a great transformation of the culture.

Another influence was the downtown dance world in New York that I first came into in the early 1980s. I've also always been inspired by musical theater and the great golden age of movie musicals, MGM musicals. I love classical dance as well. And I've recreated it in my own terms so that people are kind of hoofing in toe shoes and making noise in them. All of those forms I'm not in any way trying to make fun of, I'm using them because I adore them. However, they jostle each other and they create a kind of friction at times that I think contributes to the humor. Maybe it can seem at times to be satirical, but it really comes from love and not from any sense of deconstructing them, so to speak.

Would you say that all of these influences surface in this production?

Yes. It starts off with a song and tap dance. There are three different dances done in toe shoes, both by men and by women in a percussive style. There is some pretty straightforward classical dancing, although done in bare feet. And there are also novelty things that relate to rhythmic dancing, like dancing on bubble wrap.

It sounds like you didn't necessarily set out to create a Nutcracker, but I'm curious if there are any other Nutcrackers, specifically untraditional Nutcrackers, that influenced this?

 I was more influenced by the traditional ones than the untraditional ones. The one that I think that came into my head the most while I was choreographing this one, was the one that the Boston Ballet used to do when I myself was 10 or 11 years old. And it was very opposite of mine, really, it was 19th century London inspired. The story was highlighted in the first act. But what I loved about it, and this does show up in my own, is that once you got away from the first act, it was basically a vaudeville show, a variety show. And I loved the extravagance and the freedom of it, how liberating it felt that people were popping up into all of these different kinds of roles. And that was when I thought, I don't need to restore or stretch a narrative around this. I can use my favorite part of it as the jumping off point.

Are there elements of the traditional Nutcracker that show up? For example, any of the divertissements?

 People say they see it, but that wasn't always in my head. For instance, to the music that is usually Mother Ginger, there are people in toe shoes who support each other in a wide second position plie on point. And it makes a shape like a hoop skirt. So I've had people interpret that as the hoop skirt worn by Mother Ginger. But it wasn't in my head.

There are quotations from certain things, but set askew; there's like a reference to Apollo, there’s a reference to the Rose Adaggio from Sleeping Beauty. But those are fleeting. You don't need to know the references, but if you do, you get a little kick.

Do you have any favorite comedic moments?

The bubble wrap is maybe one of my favorite comic moments. When we were kids and presents would arrive, my mother would take them out of the box and they would often be wrapped in bubble wrap. And then she would hide them from us, but we would then snatch the bubble wrap and bang on it and jump on it. And I made the bubble wrap section about somebody who's eating her cake and having it too. Like, she is almost addicted to the bubble wrap. But by dancing on it, that's it, it goes away. And so she tries to discipline herself, like not eating candy before dinner or something. It's a dance about resisting and the failure to resist the lure of the bubble wrap.

Another one of my favorites is the thumb sucking. I think that just the juxtaposition of such an infantile thing, but also with adult associations, and also with this classical kind of sobriety and dignity. Those things colliding is what I think makes it funny rather than any particular joke.

Also, there’s Waltz of the Snowflakes. It's like a skating party, but people keep falling, and they fall in increasingly complicated rhythmic ways. So the kaboom of the fall becomes like the percussive dance element of it. So it refers to the Waltz of the Snowflakes, but it sort of subverts it by making it about falling rather than rising and being elegant.

So the Weill Art Gallery will host a winter wonderland with activities and props from the show. Is this something you’ve done in the past?

 We did that last year and it was great. The large room that’s adjacent to the theater is decorated, and there are various stations which feature the props and things we use in the show. So there's a station where there are little tap shoes. There's a station where there's bubble wrap. There's a station where there's a boa. There's a station where there are top hats. And kids can circulate among these stations, like at a carnival and play with these things, try these things out. And there's also a bunch of candy in various forms. It's very much a family thing.

Are there any messages or themes that you hope that the audience takes home with them?

 Because it's a humorous show, I don't think it comes across as a show full of messages of that sort. But there really are underlying messages. There's a sense of freedom and liberation; all of the fantasies are available equally to all of the people in the cast. Nothing is particularly gendered. I think there's also a sense of freedom between the different kinds of dance genres. And there's also an anti-hierarchy that's opposite of ballet. Everyone has a solo, everyone shines in an individual moment. And then they also go into supporting roles for other people's moments. And that’s the ideal; this community of dancers who support each other and lead each other alternately. 

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