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CM: How long have you danced the role of the Nutcracker? Because I feel as though it's been years, right? I remember watching you dance that role before I worked here. And my second part of this question is how do you keep it so fresh? Every year I watch you and you have this magical wonder as if you’re doing it for the first time.
CB: I’ve danced it every year that I have been here except for 2020 when we didn’t do Nutcracker. And I’ve shared the role with at least one other person every year that I’ve been here. And as more people have come in and rotated through, I have stayed doing it. At the same time, always checking in with other dancers who do things in a different way, and asking them why they made that particular choice, because it was cool! And I think that’s a big part of keeping the role fresh, is that we all have our own little nuances, or we adapt others’ little quirks and it's always different.
CM: Okay, I’ve been dying to ask you this. In the scene where you’ve been knocked out by the mechanical mouse doll and Drosselmeyer is trying to wake you up, how, how do you levitate off the ground? You’re the only one I’ve seen who fully levitates vertically, it's crazy!
CB [laughing]: I’ve tried to teach a couple of people how to do it. It's actually really hard to teach, I’ve discovered. It’s also terrifying because you’re landing flat on your back with no support. I mean, you have some padding from the layers of the costume. But I have knocked the wind out of myself doing that move.
CM: You have?? During shows?
CB: Oh yeah. And then you just lay there, trying to get your breath back. Also, with the new Nutcracker costumes in 2019, the mask changed. We had really gotten used to the old one, which was very easy to work with. It was just a piece of felt with eye holes and you could see really well. And with this new one, while it's an incredible mask, it is harder to see out of. It is a big mesh screen that gives you all of these little pinpoints of light, so you don’t see perfectly. You can see shapes and whether you are onstage and stuff, that part is fine. But it occasionally can get very claustrophobic there. For some reason, it is totally fine until that Drosselmeyer movement. You get knocked out by the mouse and you’re lying on the floor and really out of breath at that point because you’ve just done the variation and all that dancing with Clara. And the combo of lying flat on your back and having all the overhead lights put this strange shine over the mask is really hard. You can’t get air. And every single one of us has had a panic attack at that moment. It's the weirdest thing! The first time it happens, it is really scary. But then after it does and you know you're fine, that you’ll get air in about thirty seconds, you know it's going to be okay. It’s an odd little moment.
CM: And then you add the levitation.
CB: Yes! So I just essentially do a kip-up. Like you would from the ground to your feet, but then you fall back and just stop halfway through it. And without your hands. There’s the coordination between your feet when your feet come up, when your hips come up, when your shoulders pop up a little bit. I’m pretty sure Ethan [Schweitzer-Gaslin] did it originally. I’ve just been able to coordinate it and get it higher and higher over the years and get to a place where I can get a pretty good jump out of it.
CM: I love it so much. So, speaking of Drosselmeyer, this year you danced that role for the first time.
CB: I think it is the first time I have gotten to do a full character role like that in my career. It was so fun- it is just a cool role to explore. And obviously doing the Nutcracker part has had a lot of overlap, so I have known all of the things that Drosselmeyer does for a while, which helped a ton. There are so many different things that you’re responsible for in a really short time. And then on the flip side, sometimes it feels like you have way too much time. It’s Drosselmeyer’s responsibility to make these scenes work and make it magical. There’s a lot of acting in those moments and that was fun to dive into. Drosselmeyer’s character is special to me because it was one of my first experiences with dance. The first Nutcracker I ever did was at age fifteen and it was because my dad was asked to be Drosselmeyer. And neither of us had ever been part of a ballet before. He had done a ton of stage acting and shows. So we agreed to do this and we started researching Nutcrackers and Drosselmeyer and how he fits into the story. So it was amazing to come full circle this year.
CM: You’re pretty active and sporty outside of ballet, which I always admire so much because you all have these intensely physical days at work and then you go and do more intense things. You’re a rock climber and a cyclist, right?
CB: Yep! I like adventuring in any form. I like climbing specifically because it is extremely antagonistic to ballet. I can climb hard to the point where I completely burn out but feel 100% to dance the next day. It’s all the opposite muscles. I like to fatigue myself by doing something fun. I think most dancers enjoy the feeling of being tired at the end of the work day and being sore. And so it's nice to be able to totally exhaust myself further by climbing and not really feel any negative effects afterwards.
CM: What is something that you are continually working on?
CB: I’d say the past five or six years, really trying to work on maintaining good health.
CM: Are we talking about physical health or mental health or both?
CB: All of the above! I think it’s one of the main things that allows us to do our job at the level that we need to be able to do it, not just because of injuries and things like that, but because of mental fatigue as well and how we as dancers tend to overextend ourselves all the time, even outside of work. We go home and think about choreography and perfecting things. And then constantly making sure that you're recovering at a reasonable rate so that you don't slide downhill throughout a week, which is something I think we all deal with to a certain extent, because as a dancer, your body feels a lot better on Monday than it does on Thursday or Friday. I think for me, I’m trying to be better about having these times that I set aside for physical and mental recovery. That’s what these other physical activities do for me, cycling and climbing. I’m not thinking about dance choreography when I am climbing because climbing is its own puzzle. I think recovery in general is probably the biggest thing that dancers don’t make time for. Dancers keep adding all these things on so that we don’t get injured and then you realize, well, now I don’t have any recovery time. So it is a delicate balance. A balance I’ve worked really hard on.
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