The family then get back into partners and begin the duets again but this time doing the waltz. (1 2 step). The lively man who jokes about all the time brings out a puppet the children start to feed it nuts which made me realise it was the Hard Nut character which made me realise so must be the man. The puppet breaks and the children get upset and start fighting between themselves. The young girl runs off and tries fixing it she does eventually fix it and now owns the puppet. This makes her feel really special as she is normally left out. She treats the doll with care and starts to dance with the puppet. The family stop dancing and get in a crowd and begin to sing Christmas songs whilst her brother is running round acting as a cowboy with his gun. The girl and family find him quite annoying.
A man and women begin too dance and the oldest child who is very flirty and gets jealous easy wants to dance with the man and tries to but the man is to involved in the other women. The love in the scene grows and there are even signs of sex! The party soon finishes and everybody goes home and to bed.
The children come down and start to route through the presents under the tree and start fighting. The clock in the room disappears and the Hard Nut face appears. Three small rats come onto the stage and crawl around, the young girl is the only child left on the stage she starts to get scared. All of the settings on the stage are moved and the girl is left on her own. The music changes as if it’s building something up maybe fear.
The girl has shrunk, the settings come back on stage but they are much much bigger and all of the toys from the presents start to come alive. Mice come from under the couch and the Hard Nut also comes alive. The toys are fighting against each other it’s like a battle between two gangs, the Hard Nut against the Mice King. The Hard Nut wins and becomes a real person. A cartoon sheet comes down and hits the girl but we don’t know if she is dead or not. All the other toys disappear of the stage and two solos are going on. It’s the Hard Nut and his mirror image it then turns into a duet. They are using kicks, high leg movements and high arm movements, lifts, reaching up. The style is like ballet and they seem to be using each other to dance.
The man then lifts the nutcracker up as if he has won.
The couch comes in and they notice the young girl lying on the floor they pick her up and lie her down on the couch. They start to spin the couch.
Everything disappears of the stage and the first act is over.
Ballerinas appear on the stage. The name for these are the Cour De Ballet, these are used to fill up the time between the two acts. They are setting the scene of Christmas by throwing glitter acting as snowflakes. They use a lot of different formations but the main one is two circles an inner circle and an outer circle. They also use diagonal lines a lot and cross the lines to make an X shape. They are dancing in unison and cannon quite a lot as well. The music starts to speed up and the girl’s uncle walks through the middle of the ballerinas.
There is an instrumental played by the musicians for about 5 minutes.
Act 2
The scene opens with the couch on the stage with the girl lying on it ill and the maid sitting on a stool sitting next to her reading a magazine. The uncle comes in and starts to spin the couch; the setting is a black and white swirl moving in a circular motion it is trying to set the scene of going into a story. It has now gone back in time looking at the family’s life. The maid comes onto the stage with a pram with the young girl in, the mother and father follow on acting all motherly loving their gorges baby daughter!
The mice come across the stage and stay on the stage. The girls mother is trying to tell the maid that the mice are going to do something bad like take her baby away the maid starts to look after the baby so the parents leave her in charge and go off. The maid soon falls asleep and the mice start to dance round the maid and make a fuss over the baby. One of the white mice gets into the pram and starts to fuss over the baby even more. The maid wakes up and gets scared of the mice and jumps on the chair, the parents come in and are all upset and shocked that their baby girl has gone.
The girl’s mad uncle comes in going mad that the baby has gone missing, the mice start to do dance movements representing were the baby has gone. A nut appears on a drop down sheet behind the characters and the mice are pointing at the nut and a map appears as if to tell him he needs to look round the world for the baby. He starts to look at all the different cultures they are represented by dancers. Spain is represented by Spanish dancers and bullfighting. The next country was Japan the dancers are just doing Japanese dancing wearing bright green suits; there were three of them. He then visited Russia, which was represented, by two groups of three dancers doing a Russian dance. Lastly he visited France who was performing a ballet piece they were acting like upper class people; there were two men and two women. One of the women had a hat on whilst the other was carrying a magazine and the one of the men had a baguette in his hand.
The uncle starts to run to each country going mad a clock appears ticking away he realises time is running out he has to find the nut to bring the girl back to normal. He finally finds it and comes back a lot of the characters are on stage it’s a busy scene. He gives the girl the nut and she is back to being a normal pretty girl. They have defeated the mice king he starts to die. We then found out that all along the baby was not the quiet girl in pink it was the lively one who is always flirting and showing off, this put a twist into the story. It is trying to tell us why she is always showing of and flirting.
Everyone goes of the stage and lots of dancers come on dresses as flowers and the girls mother is dancing around them showing how happy she is that she has her daughter back. The dancers use lots of formations like a diagonal line in a cross shape and lots more. They seem to use the canon affect a lot, using flowing movements and rippling effects, heavy movements. The start doing duets and when this happened I started to notice that there was a mix of sex women and men were dressed up as flowers again it is dealing with gender issues. The music changes and they begin to dance in a different style this style is ballet. They leave the stage.
Lost of different characters come onto the stage they include the quiet girl and the nutcracker. Again it is dealing with gender issues women lifting men were it should be men lifting women! The scene suggests it’s the finale but its not its to show that the girl and the nutcracker are in love throughout the stage they keep appearing together. The characters all perform a dance together but again the girl and the nutcracker end up together. They begin a duet together to the ‘Sugar Plum Fairy’ song showing they are flirting and that they are in love. Using ballet movements and it finally leads to a kiss! He keeps on following her kissing her hand all the time. The music starts to build up and they have a distraught look on their faces and start running around in circles and the kiss again!
The characters start to run diagonally across the stage in duets and form a huge circle. The use lots of pirouettes all at the same time and then exit the stage with leaps. It leads to the girl and the nutcracker again, showing that they are deeply in love. They perform another duet and kiss again and again. They use movements to show they are in love like smooth runs and turns. They travel away from each other and come back together showing they are reaching for each other’s love! The music becomes grand and they both take centre stage, a new drop down sheet comes down with all different toys on and the music gets faster and faster.
They run of and the black and white scene from the start comes back. The stage is now back to the opening scene with the television programme on. The maid comes in going mad and turns the television off. The audience start clapping as the characters come on in duets bow and go through the door apart from the girl and the nutcracker. They finally come on last and the curtain goes up all the characters are in positions and the girl and nutcracker join them.