Hannah Jew
Growing Up with The Nutcracker

My senior year of high school lacked any defining moment marking the transition into adulthood. Not that the year was dull-my parents had divorced, I'd moved halfway across the country, started my first job, gotten into my first car accident, traveled abroad for the first time, and been accepted into college. But none of those happenings had felt like an ending or even a new start. Even my eighteenth birthday, the "official" milestone, passed quickly by, no more or less monumental than any other day of the year.

I resigned myself, starting my freshman year of college in Boston thinking that I'd missed a crucial developmental stage and would never truly feel like a bona fide adult. Then Christmas rolled around. In the week running up to finals, I decided I needed a break from studying medieval art and Plato's Republic. I dressed up, and made my way to the Boston Opera House where twenty-five dollars bought me a student rush ticket to The Nutcracker, a production in its fifth year after having been reimagined by Mikko Nissinen. This was the first show that Boston Ballet had entirely reinvented from starting principles-exciting! With a hot chocolate in my hands from the café across the street, I settled into my mezzanine seat between two groups of gossiping old ladies. It was as I waiting for the lights to go down and those first magical strains of Tchaikovsky's overture to sound, that I realized I had left my childhood behind.

Anyone who studied ballet even semi-seriously as a child will be familiar with the annual rite that is the Christmas Nutcracker. Family weekend plans are disrupted for months. The constant music is torture. If you started young enough, you will remember how it felt when you were finally old enough to audition; the feeling of having a number pinned to your leotard for the first time; and the exhilaration of seeing your name on a cast list. The experience of being a part of The Nutcracker as a student is nothing short of magical-the energies of anticipation and childish joy permeating through the dressing room, the thrill of feeling the stage lights; and, as a teenager, the camaraderie of the corps de ballet, of lacing each other into matching tutus.

As I got older, there were other ballets, but Nutcracker was ever my first, my introduction to the ethereal spectacle of theater. Each new role marked another stage of growing up, of being old enough to be a toy soldier or flower. Looking back now, I realize ballet was a safe haven for a teenager with a tumultuous home life. There was a comfort in the rules and regimen of the studio. That comfort had become so important to me, in fact, that I spent my teen years pushing back against the inescapable truth that I had zero chance of becoming a professional dancer-the fact that my dancing, and therefore my Nutcracker years, would end. That performance my first December in Boston, then, wasn't as much a rite of passage, as a confrontation with the fact of my adulthood. My Nutcracker days were behind me.

Over the last two years, I've found ways to be adjacent to ballet nonetheless, taking internships at the Kennedy Center and Boston Ballet. Delightfully, work on the business side of things has been a great fit. I love being surrounded by the idiosyncratic culture of ballet, while remaining insulated from the stage mothers and studio politics. Even so, seeing the children of the school, whether in class with a cautious two-hand grip on the barre or chattering excitedly in the hall after learning that they'd earned the roles of mice. it's bittersweet. Not for my own sake, but theirs, for I know that they will someday learn, as I did, that these years in the studio represent their stay in the Land of the Sweets. Like Clara at the end of the show, most of them will have to leave it behind for the real world all too soon. Hold onto this, I want to tell them. Hang on to every moment before it's nothing but a dream.

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Hannah Jew studies art history at Boston University, where she is a principal moderator of the undergraduate interdisciplinary student society, Word & Way. She can be found on Twitter @han_frances_j

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