Interview: Stephen Mills' The Nutcracker [dance]

How many years have you been involved in The Nutcracker?

From the very beginning, since 1979, maybe. You do the math… [laughs]. It’s a lot of Nutcrackers, it’s a lot of Tchaikovsky, it’s a lot of candy canes.

How do you go about choreographing a classic?

The interesting part about The Nutcracker is that, unlike Swan Lake or The Sleeping Beauty, whose original choreography still exists… [they can be traced back to the original production], Nutcracker isn’t like that. I think that when it was first created it wasn’t very successful, and so it was abandoned. We hear the music in the mall, we hear it everywhere there’s no way we can escape it in America. But in Europe, in Russia, up until about 15 years ago people didn’t even know this ballet, so there isn’t really an existing staging of this. I wasn’t really trapped by the idea that I was doing harm to a classic. In some ways very liberating in the sense that I could tell my own story, design my own steps. We made this about ten or eleven years ago, and I don’t change large sections of it, but I change elements of things based upon who the dancers are. One dancer comes in and they’re a really great turner I might put turns in, take out something and add turns, to really play to the dancer’s abilities.

What’s it like doing such a big production that involves so many dancers and lots of children?

It’s a professional production, and it’s a professional school, so before the children come to the audition they’re provided with the rehearsal times and the performance dates, so they get all of that ahead of time to decide whether they can participate. With school and the holidays, a lot of families opt not to. They have all of that up front and then the schedule goes. There’s no playing around.

Do you find Austin to be generally receptive to the arts?

I think that Austin is one of the most receptive towns to live performance in general, don’t you think? Not just music—clearly music is a component of it but just in general—there’s a statistic that Austin is one of only nineteen cities in the country that has a symphony, an opera, and a ballet. That means that there is support, not just for those organizations but for plenty of theater options, and modern dance options, and wonderful things.

Is that a big reason why you’re here?

It is. It really is. I did the New York thing, and I loved it, and I would never do it again. I’m not chasing—you know when you’re young you chase fame? I’m in a place in my life where I’m comfortable where I’m living, the audience supports what I do, and I’m able to do the work I want to do even when it’s very controversial. I’m able to do it here, and in other places I might not be able to do that. And I’m able to travel out and do freelance work around the world. And still come back. I’m able to achieve my goals here and so I don’t see why I would live in a horrible place when I could live in a wonderful place like Austin.

Are you in a different mindset in the middle of a production like this as compared to Cult of Color or something more controversial? Do you look forward to getting back to something like that?

As an artist it’s kind of strange to say, but I don’t make work specifically for an audience. Artists make work because they enjoy making work, and as a choreographic artist I enjoy making work to be in the studio with dancers, regardless of what it is. I like the idea of making new work, which is always more interesting to me than staging existing work. The audience for Nutcracker is a very different audience than you find for other work. Not better or worse—it’s just different, and some people, The Nutcracker will be their only dance experience all year. And god bless them. We love them. But they’re coming for a specific purpose. It might be about dancing, it might be about family tradition, it might be about the holiday. There are plenty of reasons people do things, and we’re happy to be a part of that. So yeah, I enjoy Nutcracker, and I will enjoy working on the next project, which is this Bach project that we’re doing.

Can you talk more about that?
The piece is called Truth and Beauty/The Bach Project and it is a full-length multimedia kind of piece. Some of the music is by Bach, and some of the music, Graham Reynolds is creating a new piece based upon some Bach pieces. So you know it’s not going to be very baroque in nature. Just taking inspiration from the music of Bach and seeing where that goes.

What’s your favorite dance in the Nutcracker?

I’m so jaded about it, it’s hard to say. I think I like the snow corps, because it sort of encompasses everything that people imagine classical ballet to be. People get really bent out of shape when they come to a performance and they say “that’s not what I thought classical ballet was going to be”. It’s a leotard—oh my gosh, and it was strange music. So it encompasses that idea of 19th century classical ballet, and it really says a lot about the choreographer, which I’m always judging. I really honestly don’t watch dancing so much as I watch shape and design and spatial movement and things like that, so I can get an idea about the sensibility of that choreographer based upon how they move people around. I use that as my guide.

Do you have the chance to see the work of other choreographers very often?

There are things that come through. I think the PAC and The Long Center do a good job at bringing in international work. There’s some really great choreography being made here in Austin as well, but I travel a lot because I think it’s important to be up to date with what artists are thinking about and producing and where the trends are happening and how is pop culture affecting work. I spend a lot of time in Europe—last summer I was in Lyon,, and the year before in Montpelier where they have really large dance festivals. European dance is very different than American dance, and it’s interesting to see what flies there and what would not fly here in the States.

Ballet Austin’s The Nutcracker, with choreography by Stephen Mills and music performed by the Austin Symphony Orchestra, begins its annual run at The Long Center on Dec. 5.