When it’s the holiday season, you can’t swing a bough of holly without hitting another earnest-but-tired community production of Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker.” New York dance company the Bang Group’s “Nut/Cracked” is not one of those. Conceived by choreographer David Parker, who cofounded the Bang Group in 1995, the show puts an irreverent spin on the classic by incorporating not just traditional ballet, but also tap dancing, disco, swing, and even a few hilarious sight gags. We spoke with Parker via email ahead of the company’s performances of “Nut/Cracked” at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in Tivoli.
—Peter Aaron
The Bang Group turns 30 years old next year. Congratulations! What comes to mind as you look back at what the company has accomplished over the decades? How do you see it evolving as you head into the next decade?
We’ve succeeded at creating a form of contemporary dance that embraces tap dancing, humor, ballet, contemporary dance, vaudevillian innovation, gay culture, and theater. It is always driven by rhythm and devoted to the revelation of intimate relationships and states of mind. I see this form creating ever deeper connections between genres at the level of rhythm, thereby erasing boundaries and opening doors to new choreographic possibilities. This work has kept us in the public eye for over 30 years and shows every sign of continuing to do so.
At this point, “Nut/Cracked” itself has been in existence for more than 20 years. How did the show come into being, and how has it changed over time? For those who haven’t seen it, how would you describe it and what makes it different from the many other “Nutcracker” productions that people have to choose from during the holiday season?
“Nut/Cracked” was commissioned by Dance Theater Workshop (now NYLA) and the Carlo Felice Opera House in Genoa, Italy, in 2003. This came about because I had choreographed a work called “Bang and Suck” in 1992, and it had become very popular on tour, especially in Europe. It was, not surprisingly, about intimate relations between two men, myself and my dance partner Jeffrey Kazin, and the second section of it was danced to “The Grand Pas de Deux” from “The Nutcracker” featuring Jeff and I engaged in classical partnering accomplished through mutual thumb sucking. An Italian presenter saw this and commissioned an evening-length work that dealt with the whole “Nutcracker” in the same spirit. This “Nutcracker,” which I called “Nut/Cracked,” was created for my beloved downtown dance world in New York City and the scrappy, plucky, gritty spirit of its denizens. I thought we deserved our own homemade, dance-forward, irreverent version that reflected who we are and what the winter holidays have come to mean for us. It is a plotless, comic/subversive, neo-vaudevillian version of “The Nutcracker” that highlights percussive dance elements and is leavened by humor and a gender-fluid approach to the casting as well as a hearty dollop of gay/queer sensibility. It is not a satire, but a loving tribute restated in contemporary terms in my own (New York) dialect.
Which choreographers have inspired you?
I grew up simultaneously training in tap, ballet, and modern dance in the ’70s. I didn’t see these forms as in any way opposed to one another, so I drew on them equally as I began to make my own work. My biggest inspiration at the time was Twyla Tharp, who was also doing this in the work that I saw at that time: “Deuce Coupe,” “Eight Jelly Rolls,” “Sue’s Leg,” “The Fugue,” and “Baker’s Dozen.” I was also terribly inspired by Merce Cunningham’s work, due to its unyielding formalism, theatrical potency, and syncopated rhythms. My colleagues of the time in New York City also influenced me: Tere O’Connor, Keely Garfield, Susan Marshall, Bebe Miller, Ralph Lemon, and Sara Hook (with whom I collaborated often). I also worked with two wonderful experimental tap dance companies during the ’80s and ’90s, Gail Conrad’s Tap Dance Theater and Anita Feldman’s Body and Soul. I am drawn to the dancing and choreography of Golden Age Hollywood musicals, primarily those of Fred Astaire and, to a lesser extent, Gene Kelly, because they were so strongly inflected toward psychological, romantic, and theatrical communication and because they used tap dancing as a kind of dramatic engine and not solely as a form of music. They were also completely legible as drama and as dance at the same time and almost always got right to the point.
The Bang Group is known for the uniquely percussive nature of its performances. When many people see the term “percussive dance,” they might think of traditional tap dance or over-the-top shows like “Stomp.” How is your approach to percussive dance different from those variants?
I think my approach is more oriented toward the exposure of relationships, states of mind, psychology, and the humor that flows from them than on rhythmic virtuosity per se. Even when we are dancing a physicalization of a musical score, which we often do, I seek to reveal the way we are with each other in the world rather than in an otherwise abstract dimension.
Besides being entertained, what do you most hope that people pick up on about the show while attending one of the “Nut/Cracked” performances at Kaatsbaan this month? What feelings or experiential effects are you most interested in conveying?
I’m most interested in conveying a sense of freedom. Each of the 20 odd sections of “Nut/Cracked” is centered on a present, a gift, that allows the dancer to transform in some way and to give free rein to some fantasy incarnation or impulse—these include toe shoes, bubble wrap, a takeout noodle, a Christmas tree, a feather boa, red gloves, snow and snow hats, bouquets of flowers, and on and on until finally the gift is already ours, our own two thumbs. It’s a paean to the body electric in its myriad incarnations. For me, “Nut/Cracked” offers a sense of timeless, genderless, ageless liberation and the ability to reconfigure old traditions into new celebrations.
This article appears in December 2024.
