“One of the first things to remember if you want to dance tonight — if you don’t have ballet slippers, which I’m sure most of you do — is just take off your shoes and dance in your socks,” Mark Sutton told the audience at the Cultural Center on Sunday, where folding chairs circled a makeshift dance floor and the Lakeside Symphonic Band was perched on a temporary stage. He was dressed in a red turtleneck, red socks and a Santa hat; some of the band members wore reindeer antlers.
“The second rule?” Sutton added: “No throwing up on the dance floor.”
This seemed like a cinch, but Sutton stressed that second rule, addressing two audience member in particular. “Do you agree?” he asked, walking over to their front-row seats. “You going to throw up?”
Gigi Payovich, 5, and her sister Lily, 3, shook their heads.
Apparently, at a performance of the Dance-Along Nutcracker earlier that day, one of the 250 kids who packed the floor had broken Rule No. 2. Sutton was still a bit traumatized. Gigi and Lily were among the few kids at the 7 p.m. show, which was meant mainly for “a more mature audience,” one that tends not to throw up as a result of too much spinning and prancing.
Once the dancing got started, though, the assortment of aspiring Sugar Plum Fairies assembled under the stained-glass dome of Preston Bradley Hall didn’t exactly seem “more mature.” Almost everybody — from the teen girls to the middle-age men to the gray-haired ladies — reverted to childlike abandon once their socks hit the dance floor, and a lot of people seemed pretty serious about wanting to beat Gigi and Lily and a mysterious young woman named Hunter (who wore a very professional looking Snowflake costume with pants underneath and was accompanied by a woman who looked like her grandmother but might have been her agent) for the “dance-off” prize at the end of the evening.
The Dance-Along Nutcracker is the latest in a string of do-it-yourself entertainment. “Sing-A-Long Wizard of Oz.” “Sing-Along Messiah.” “Sing-a-Long Sound of Music.” But usually, by the time a cultural event earns “along” status, everyone knows all of the words. And if you’re a crummy singer you can just mouth the words. Not so with dance.
So everyone submitted to instruction from three professional ballerinas, who had much better bodies than everyone else in the room and who first performed solo renditions of “The Arabian” (harem pants), “The Spanish” (lace skirt, fan), and “The Chinese” (olive silk, frog buttons), from Act II. Very inspiring.
They also submitted to Sutton’s stand-up-comic/kindergarten-teacher shtick, which, it turned out, was sort of necessary. “After they dance their solos, the professional dance portion of the program will be over. This is not a dance recital. It’s Dance along.”
For the most part everyone obeyed this rule, until they got overstimulated, and then there was a lot of improvising — which is where the trouble always starts.
This is why we have rules.
“But this is not just a dance-along, it’s a singalong too,” Sutton snapped.
We obediently muddled through “Sleigh Ride,” which — aside from the lines “Giddy-yap giddy-yap giddy-yap let’s go” and “Pop! Pop! Pop,” which everyone screamed — must be the most difficult tune in the Christmas canon, and later a medley of carols that the band performed in such a high key that we all sounded like castratos, especially during “Silent Night.”
Ballet class
And then it was time for everyone to learn to be a ballerina. (I’d had a bad audition experience as a child, very traumatic, so I just watched.)
“Hi. We’re going to be doing the `Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies'” one of the professional ballerinas said, as the dance floor filled up. “And it’s going to be one and two three and four. One two three four,” she said as she demonstrated things I can’t remember exactly — arms in circles above the head, and some spinning.
Then she sped it up, and a man in a sports blazer, a woman in a Dr. Seuss hat, two lanky teenage girls, a man in a fedora, a guy with a huge belly, a woman in her own Degas tutu and another dressed in a black kimono stood out in a crowd that really seemed to be catching on.
“Shall we try it now with music?”
Everyone laughed nervously, and the next thing I knew, they were dancing along badly, and the band was performing the tinkly reedy music draggily but with gusto, and it was the most strangely beautiful thing I’d seen in a long time.
Same with Strauss’ “Emperor’s Waltz,” during which everyone somehow naturally fell into a big circle without being told, grabbed partners they had never met and danced. (Waltzing seems to bring out the best in people.) And with the “Russian Dance,” which was complicated by a lot of hopping with crossed arms, and tiny double-time steps, and some “The King and I”-style arm waving.
And the winners are . . .
But the best part of the evening was the dance-off, which was won by the somewhat aloof Hunter (first place: a Christmas tree hat), with Lily (second place: same) and Gigi (third place: huge candy cane) close behind. The three girls won not just because children naturally have the purest souls, or because they completely missed the disco era and were therefore uninhibited in their interpretation of the various tunes by ABBA that were played as accompaniment, but because they really were good. And also, of course, because the guy in the fedora fell down and was laid out on his back when the music ended, the guy in the flowered velvet shirt was deemed “just a little too good” by Sutton and the woman in the Dr. Seuss hat just walked off the dance floor to get a drink of water before Sutton told her she could move. “Where are you going?” he asked, pointing at her. You can’t just walk off the stage. No. You’re out too.”
In addition to their prizes (“This is all sugar,” Sutton told Gigi, as he gave her the candy cane. “I want you to eat the entire thing before bedtime”), the trio of winners got to lead the final dance, which they turned into a free-for-all of leaps and running and spinning, sometimes with the hands on the hips.
When it was over, I rushed over to interview the 2003 Dance-Along winning sisters, as their parents bundled them up. They seemed to be exhausted.
“How did it feel to win?”
They nodded.
“Will you be able to incorporate these new dance steps into future performances?”
Silence. Glazed look.
“Are you going home and going straight to bed?”
They shook their heads.
I was unable to locate the grand prize winner, Hunter, however. Her agent/grandmother had whisked her away.
