Review: "The Nutcracker Chronicles" by Janine Kovac

The Nutcracker Chronicles by Janine Kovac
Published November 2024 via She Writes Press
★★★★

Kovac got her start in ballet the way so many children do: with the Nutcracker. Even when the magic of the show was ruined by seeing it up close, behind the scenes, something in it called to her. And as she stayed with it, with the Nutcracker and with ballet, advancing her technique, she knew that this, this was what she wanted to do.

I didn't always find my inner light, but I always worked for it. When I did catch it, if felt like catching a live wire. (loc. 1587*)

By my reckoning, Kovac was successful as a dancer; she danced professionally for years, in the US and internationally, and was able—more or less—to sustain herself doing so; in the arts, that is no sure thing. But there are varying degrees of success, and one of the things that makes The Nutcracker Chronicles so interesting is that Kovac was not a principal dancer or dancing for, e.g., NYCB; she was a working dancer, doing things she loved and constantly striving to improve, but she never really had a sense that she'd 'made it'. I love the way she talks about dancing Fritz in the Nutcracker (becoming one with the role, quite by accident, by dint of jealousy of the girl playing Clara), and the way she describes the ballet world in El Paso, where she grew up and learned to dance:

My mother always said Ballet El Paso's party scene [in the Nutcracker] was the best party scene she'd ever seen. Better than the Baryshnikov version on PBS and Pacific Ballet's movie put together. Better even than San Francisco Ballet.

"When you're watching San Francisco Ballet, you know it's going to be perfect. But with Ballet El Paso, you never knew what was going to happen. It was like a real party."

It was true. Someone's costume might tear, or a piece of precariously built scenery would break. In 1982, the guy who danced the role of Clara and Fritz's father packed his pipe with pot and smoked it onstage; the same guy spiked the party punch with vodka. Once, Drosselmeier didn't show up to the party at all, rumored to be stuck in the drunk tank of a Juárez jail cell. Fritz had to be the one to give Clara the nutcracker, only to grab it from her thirty-two counts later to break it. (loc. 252)

I love this because it feels real—not that young dancers shouldn't dream of dancing for NYCB and ABT and so on, but the vast majority of dancers don't, and I'm...I was going to say I'm just as interested in reading about the smaller, scrappier ballets, but actually in some ways I'm more interested in the smaller companies (later in the book, Kovac describes dancing in Italy on a stage so small that they had to replace some of their props—for example, borrowing the only table in the only café in the village), because their stories feel so specific and also with (if I'm honest) less risk of the book becoming one long name-drop.

This is a good story, and it's good writing. I don't know where Kovac found her early readers, but she has quotes from Sara Nović and Putsata Reang, and my gosh I swooned when I saw that (generally I don't bother to read praise quotes, and I can't for the life of me tell you what either of these ones said, but my eyes caught on the names because they're two of the small number of authors who have written books for which I really have no critiques. (And: I'm happy to report that they have good taste.)

Probably nobody else has had Kovac's exact career trajectory. Her career eventually went the way of many—but what that means, I'll leave you to read.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.