December 14, 2007

Orientalism in Ballet

By MARTHA ULLMAN WEST

Here they come, as they do every Christmas, to the piercing sound of flutes and thumping rhythms of plucked strings: adorably cute dancers dressed in silk pajamas, sometimes emerging from tea boxes, sometimes as the front and back ends of a dragon, sometimes doing a ribbon dance, almost always doing some virtuoso ballet step. They are performing the "tea" variation in The Nutcracker, which, since George Balanchine restaged the 1892 choreography in 1954, is the world's most frequently

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