Joel Hall Dancers
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That doesn’t mean Hall can simply wiggle his hips and create a new holiday tradition. Nuts & Bolts has enormous potential: when grand old ballet shares the stage with cool modern jazz, just about anything can happen. Hall pokes fun at the contrasts, and the result was charming. (To the kid across the aisle–and kids are the ultimate arbiters of holiday dance specials–some movements were downright funny.) Throughout, the lead “ballerinas” wear purple and fuchsia tutus and Walkman headphones. In one movement the whole troupe jitterbug; in another they bop about in the same way the gang gets down in the party scene from A Charlie Brown Christmas. Perhaps the most entertaining was “Chinois Chocolat,” a goofy parody of ballet’s sensuous pas de deux (danced by Angel Abcede and Vanessa Truvillion) complete with kid-approved butt jokes.
But while Nuts & Bolts seems fresh on a first viewing, it might easily feel even more dated than the century-old Nutcracker. This is an inherent problem with jazz dance, which is often no more than glorified street or club dancing, in which coolness comes and goes with the wind. A dance choreographed for the stage must have emotional depth, not just a hip veneer, or it too will be gone with the wind.
