“Young children are easily impressed,” we often say. Or so it seems that they are. One of the reasons I love attending the school tour performances of The Nutcracker (a shortened version
consisting of Act II) with my daughter’s ballet studio is that I get to see the
genuine delight of the young school children in attendance. It’s usually the
youngest students who most readily express their joy at seeing the ballet.
There are gasps when each new group takes the stage, as the children see the
colorful costumes and anticipate the dance that is about to begin.
The students are instructed in the ballet director’s
introduction that, as a good ballet audience, they should feel free to applaud
when they see something they like, something that looks hard, or something they
think is pretty. Many young children do this with gusto, especially upon seeing
the dramatic lifts in the pas de deux.
Perhaps some of them have never seen anything like it before. Perhaps they
have, and it just doesn’t get old for them.
When the Nutcracker performance is for an older group, such
as 4th-5th graders, the audience is often more subdued.
There are usually fewer delighted gasps, and often no clapping even during the
dramatic lifts. It makes one wonder, are older
children less easily impressed than younger children? I tend to think not.
Especially considering that as they get older their proprioception improves and
they have a better understanding of how much work and discipline it takes to
make their bodies do specialized movements like those of ballet. Some of these school
students even had Ballet North come and do a P.E. class session for them a
while back, during which they got first-hand experience of how difficult a
barre class can be.
My theory is that many of the older children are just as
impressed with the performance and are enjoying it just as much as the younger
students, but have adopted inhibitions which prevent them from expressing their
joy. This made me think of a lesson I’ve learned from G. K. Chesterton, a
writer who delights in childlike joy like no other writer I’ve ever read. His
character Innocent Smith in Manalive
is a stark contrast to those around him because he is a man who has NOT lost
the wonder and delight of a young child. His eccentric dress and physical
demeanor startle his peers, as do his practices of having picnics on the roof, proposing
to the same woman (his wife) multiple times and breaking into his own
house. The author explains, “[H]e was simply
forgetting himself, like a little boy at a party. He had somehow made a giant
stride from babyhood to manhood, and missed that crisis in youth when most of
us grow old.” He rejects the conventions of adulthood which inhibit the
expression of joy, and this is the scandal of the story.
The character of Innocent Smith seems to be a reflection of
Chesterton himself. The author inspires his readers to view the world with a childlike
wonder and playfulness. In his essay “On Running After One’s Hat” he considers
the comical scenario of a man chasing his hat in the wind, and marvels that men
should not always find it a matter of great entertainment, even if they
themselves are the source of the ridiculous episode. For they should think of
the pleasure their entertainment is bringing to the crowd of onlookers. Such a
childlike disposition, Chesterton exhorts, helps one to have the romantic
attitude that “an adventure is
only an inconvenience rightly considered” and “an inconvenience is only an
adventure wrongly considered.” With some imagination the process of pulling
open a jammed drawer can be seen to equal the task of “tugging up a lifeboat
out of the sea” or “roping up a fellow-creature out of an Alpine crevass.” Life
certainly could be filled with great joy and adventure if perpetually viewed
through the eyes of childlike wonder.
These are the things I think of when I witness the delight
of young children watching the Nutcracker school performances. I don’t think primarily
of all the hard work and planning and practice that went into it, though I
certainly have an appreciation of those things. Rather, I think of seeing it through the eyes
of a child. I find myself willing them to clap freely, not for the skill of the
dancers, but out of the joy they should feel free to express. I hope my
daughter keeps doing these performances for many years to come. I love to watch
her dance, but I also love to see the joy that beauty brings. I like to see the young children show this joy outwardly, and I like to imagine that the older children, in their minds if not with their applause, are saying, “Do it again!”
