Review by BRYAN ROURKE of The Providence Journal.
December 15, 2005
PROVIDENCE — You're at a party. You're wearing a lampshade on your head. Music's playing. You want to dance.
But you've got a problem. You can't see. You worry about ending up in the punch bowl.
So you poke holes for eyes. It doesn't help much. You still have no peripheral vision. But that doesn't stop you.
You snap your fingers. You sway your head. You shuffle your feet. But the thousands of people watching you want more. They want dynamic dance.
You wonder if you're up to it. But mostly, you wonder how so many people got into your living room. Yes, you've had some punch, but not that much, although you are wearing a lampshade.
Still, you listen to what they say: Run. Jump. Spin. Take a partner. And if possible, look graceful, natural and completely comfortable prancing about in your lampshade.
Nuts, you say.
No, Nutcracker.
This weekend, Festival Ballet Providence performs five shows of the Christmas perennial over three days at the Providence Performing Arts Center. Audiences will likely get swept up in the story of a little girl getting a Christmas gift.
They'll see impressive sets, exquisite costumes and a fantastical tale of dance. Yet will audiences truly appreciate how the performers' dancing is made so much more difficult by their lampshade-like masks?
"They have no clue," says Leticia Guerrero, a Festival dancer. "They just see the Mouse Queen and the Nutcracker. They think, 'Oh, that looks nice.' I don't think they ever think, 'Can they see? Can they jump? How do they turn?' "
The answer is: with difficulty, and lots of practice.
"It's definitely not easy," says Ty Parmenter, a Festival dancer. "You have tunnel vision. It's like you're looking through binoculars."
Parmenter plays Festival's Nutcracker. Guerrero plays his nemesis: the Mouse Queen. For both, this is their third year in the roles.
"I pretty much rely on rehearsal," Parmenter says. "I can't really see that much."
Different masks
The masks for the Nutcracker and Mouse Queen are fundamentally different, not just in appearance, but design. The Nutcracker's mask is like a deep-sea diver's helmet, but without an oxygen hose.
"You're breathing in the same air for a while," Parmenter says. "And you're jumping and jumping."
You might wonder if Parmenter is getting enough air.
"Probably not as much as I should be getting," he says. "But I can still stand. I'm not passing out."
While the Nutcracker's mask surrounds Parmenter's head, the Mouse Queen's sits atop Guerrero's head, kind of like a big baseball cap with an 18-inch visor -- an enormous rodent nose.
Guerrero's face, meanwhile, is completely exposed.
"I actually get to see," Guerrero says. "That helps. Even though you're looking down, you have a sense of where you are, though there are the blinding stage lights."
Guerrero is not supposed to see much more than the floor. She's supposed to dance with her head down so the audience sees the mouse face atop her head.
"It's hard, dancing with your face down all the time," Guerrero says. "It gets very dizzying."
Put these two people together. Parmenter is vision-impaired. And Guerrero is seeing stars.
Now dance. And remember, look good. And try not to hurt yourselves.
Parmenter and Guerrero fight on stage. It's a choreographed sword fight. So not only are they moving their feet, but crossing their swords.
"I can't see when she's coming at me," Parmenter says. "I just pray she's in the right place at the right time."
So Guerrero, with her stooped neck and down-cast eyes, initiates the interaction with Parmenter.
"I look for his feet," she says. "If he's too far away, I don't know if I'm hitting his sword or not."
When Guerrero raises her sword, she has to be careful. She doesn't want to appear as though she's trying to amputate her character's snout.
"If I don't stretch my arms far enough, I hit the nose," Guerrero says. "But if I stretch them too far, I throw myself out of whack."
A life of their own
Balance is a nice thing for dancers. It can mean the difference between performing and falling.
The Nutcracker choreography takes this into consideration.
"It's choreographed so people with masks can cope," Parmenter says. "It's not too much, but it has its challenges."
Spinning is certainly a challenge.
The masks make Parmenter's head top-heavy, and Guerrero's frontheavy. When they pirouette, their masks acquire a momentum and life of their own.
"When I turn my head, the [mask's] nose turns my head harder," Guerrero says.
"You can't do too many pirouettes, because you'll fall," Parmenter says. "Your vision is limited and you're a foot taller, and the helmet is swaying above your head."
Under such conditions, Parmenter says, if your center of gravity is ever so slightly off center, you're in big trouble.
To maintain balance, dancers usually practice a technique called spotting. This involves focusing on a particular spot while they spin. Think of it like looking at the horizon while aboard a boat. It prevents dancers from getting dizzy.
"Spotting doesn't work with a mask," Parmenter says. "As soon as you move your head, the mask will shift, and your vision is even more limited than it was before."
Getting into character
Performing ballet with a mask is not new, or novel. In fact, back in the Renaissance, most parts were performed with masks, and most roles were performed by men.
However, dancing behind a dainty Venetian mask is very different than doing so in a Nutcracker or Mouse Queen lampshade. Yet Parmenter and Guerrero manage, performing the same movements as maskless dancers, although to a different degree.
"You have to hold back a little bit," Parmenter says. "You have to cut down your power so you don't kill yourself."
But, you say, certainly there must be something good about dancing in a mask. And Guerrero agrees.
"I can't be mean until I've got the mask on," she says. "I need the mask to get into the character. It helps to have it on my head. It brings something else out in me."
More basically, masks can make dancers dance harder. Ballet is about communicating emotion through movement. Dancers with masks can't rely on their faces to convey feelings.
"As soon as you put on the mask, you have to rely on your body," Parmenter says. "People in the back row aren't going to know what you're trying to say otherwise."
Mask comes off
For the entire time that Guerrero is the Mouse Queen, which is about 10 minutes, she's got that gigantic mouse-head baseball cap on her head, and she's looking down. She's fighting the Nutcracker, surrounded by her army of mini mice, played by children with their own little masks.
"I can't get too close to the kids, or we'll crash noses," Guerrero says.
With her head often turned away from the audience, Guerrero frequently finds herself looking at the children behind her on stage.
"I make faces," Guerrero says. "I stick out my tongue at them."
Guerrero says that helps the children relax, lighten up and perform better. Similarly, sometimes she talks to them on stage.
"I say, 'I'm going to change the story. I'm going to kill the Nutcracker. Watch.' "
But, of course, the battle always ends badly for the Mouse Queen. The Nutcracker, meanwhile, lives, although he does fall to the floor. Then he's surrounded by children. And his mask-helmet lampshade is removed.
"I can breathe," Parmenter says. "I like that part."
When Parmenter stands up without a mask, he's no longer an animated, life-sized dancing doll of a nutcracker. He's a man, who behind a screen of children has quickly fixed his hair.
"You have to make sure when the mask comes off that you're neat and tidy," Parmenter says. "You want to look like a prince, not a homeless person."
And for the remainder of the show, Parmenter is a person doing difficult dancing, but without the added difficulty of a mask, which he thinks about, but, he hopes, viewers don't.
"I don't think the audience is actually supposed to think, 'Is this hard?' " Parmenter says. "If they're thinking, 'There's the Nutcracker; there's the Mouse Queen,' we did our job."
Festival Ballet Providence performs The Nutcracker at PPAC, 220 Weybosset St., tomorrow at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 1 and 6:30 p.m. For tickets, $16.50 to $55, call (401) 421-2787 or visit www.ppacri.org.
Article published by The Providence Journal on Thursday, December 15, 2005. All Rights Reserved.
