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Stage

Not your granddaughter's 'Nutcracker'

David Parker and the Bang Group present Nut/Cracked, a dance that ditches the Nutcracker story but keeps the music and adds whimsy.

By MARTY CLEAR
Published December 1, 2005

Choreographer David Parker introduced Nut/Cracked, his affectionate alternative take on the classic holiday ballet The Nutcracker, just two years ago. But it has already become such a popular Christmas piece that David Parker and the Bang Group will have two casts performing it simultaneously this year, one in New York and one in Tampa.

The roots of Nut/Cracked go several years farther back, when Parker created a work called Suck.

"I have for the past 12 years been doing a piece that's become pretty well known, a pas de deux for two men who are sucking each other's thumbs," he said. "I set it to The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies, just because I like that music."

When Parker and his company performed the piece in Italy, someone suggested that he create an entire Nutcracker, all done in the same spirit as Suck.

The idea had never occurred to Parker, but it immediately resonated. He had always loved Tchaikovsky's music, and the idea of designing a full-length dance around it was intriguing.

It was a departure from the original focus of David Parker and the Bang Group. When the company formed 10 years ago, all its works were essentially a cappella. The only music came from percussive sounds created by the dancers in the course of the dance. They wore tap shoes or slapped various body parts or wore Velcro suits that created ripping sounds when dancers pulled away from each other.

Such sounds are still a part of the company's work - Nut/Cracked includes a segment in which a woman dances on bubble wrap - but more and more traditional music has crept in.

Nut/Cracked abandons the story line of The Nutcracker but keeps the music. At first, most of the music comes from Duke Ellington and other jazz artists who have recorded syncopated versions of Nutcracker segments, so it gives the work an urban feel; gradually the jazz gives way to familiar orchestral treatments.

There's plenty of silliness involved in Nut/Cracked, but it's not essentially a silly piece, Parker said.

"It's funny, just because of the kind of person I am," Parker said. "But it's not a parody of The Nutcracker. My idea for the title was that we're cracking open The Nutcracker and looking at what's inside."

Nut/Cracked by David Parker and the Bang Group, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday, TECO Theater at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center's Patel Conservatory, 1010 N MacInnes Place, Tampa. $21.50. 813 229-7827 or www.tbpac.org

[Last modified November 30, 2005, 11:47:04]