It ain’t easy. Last year in St. Charles, that city’s self-appointed guardians of holiday decorum fired their festival fairy for cursing during her mandatory drug test. Or consider the demands of dancing the role of Sugar Plum Fairy in the Saint Louis Ballet’s annual take on The Nutcracker. Tanya Strautmann pulls it off with style, grace, and a healthy sense of humor.
• I joined the company in ’96 out of high school, and I’ve been dancing the part of the Sugar Plum Fairy for a while now, at least 10 years. Each time I do it, I try to approach it as if I haven’t done it before, to make it fresh for myself and the audience.
• The Sugar Plum Fairy is the queen of the land of the sweets. When Clara is brought from her dreamlike state into the land of sweets, the Sugar Plum Fairy becomes kind of the conductor of the second act. She has a distinctive theme, and it peaks with the grand pas de deux of the Nutcracker, which is what everyone looks forward to. Everyone sort of looks to the fairy as the essence of the ballet.
• I wear a tutu that is sort of plum-colored, a bright purple, with shimmering stones on the front. I also wear a tiara with sparkling rhinestones, and a bunch of the dancers, including me, carry a wand to sprinkle “sugar plum fairy dust” at the opening of Act Two.
• I have never worn a tutu in public. They’re not the most comfortable things.
• Each part of the second act symbolizes some sort of candy. Each character who’s dancing represents something sweet they’d like to offer Clara. I don’t really think of myself as a piece of candy while dancing, exactly. But I guess you can try to be the essence of sweetness.
• There are 80 children in the Nutcracker, and children do funny things. We had a show a few years ago where one of the angels needed to, you know, release some water, so she did—right onstage. We just danced around it. We’re all human. The show may not always go perfectly.
• The company puts on a Sugar Plum Fairy luncheon, and families can bring young children. We bring in the characters to do photos, and the fairy is one of the big characters to get a photo with. After the luncheon, the performance immediately follows, so it’s an all-day outing for the whole family to do together. Sometimes some of the little girls wear a tutu• style dress.
• Ballet is pretty hard on the body. We have an hour-and-a-half class every day, where we do the same type of steps again and again to maintain what we’ve built up through our lives as dancers. As we get older, we get pains and injuries. It’s an art, but it’s very athletic. You have to be in shape. They start us girls en pointe around age 10 or 12, but it’s about your whole body, not just your toes. The stronger your body is, the less pressure there is on your feet. At a certain point, you really don’t notice it. The calluses you develop help, too. Some people have an easier time than others, but if you do it every day, it becomes second nature. The hard shoes help; I get a new pair for each show.
• The Saint Louis Ballet season is about 25 weeks a year. We start back up in September. We rehearse six days a week, about four to five hours a day. The season goes through May. We’re doing Romeo and Juliet in February and a contemporary ballet in May.
• I did try a sugar plum once. I got one as a gift. I wasn’t really that impressed. I’d rather have chocolate.
