It’s a season of firsts for Saint Louis Dance Theatre. The contemporary dance company known for a decade as Big Muddy has a new name, a new look and a reenergized commitment to St. Louis dance audiences. Next week, the company also unveils its new Ellington/Strayhorn Nutcracker, inspired by their home city and its rich jazz history.
For many families, the holidays are not complete without a trip to The Nutcracker. And for American ballet companies, Nutcracker is also an agreement. Countless versions of the ballet feed audiences’ unwavering fealty to the classic coming-of-age story about a young girl who voyages to a candy-coated dreamland. In return, those audiences show up year after year, filling coffers that, for some ballet companies, keep the lights on the rest of the year.
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Saint Louis Dance Theatre now looks to serve up their slice of the Nutcracker pie, but it’s not their first holiday rodeo. In 2019, SLDT mounted then-artistic director Brian Enos’ take on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but the pandemic and Enos’ departure bungled further attempts at giving the ballet long-term teeth. On December 20 and 21, director Kirven Douthit-Boyd will test-drive a holiday ballet of his own, mounting a one-act narrative work set to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s 1960 Nutcracker Suite.
Musicians from Jazz St. Louis will join the dancers onstage at Chaminade’s Skip Viragh Performing Arts Center in Creve Coeur. They’ve performed the big-band adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s 1892 ballet for a decade—but never like this.
“To respect the Ellington/Strayhorn work, a dance company has to come with a great deal of confidence to the music,” says Jazz St. Louis president and CEO Victor Goines. “Kirven brings that. It’s a perfect marriage between two organizations with one heart.”
As with Black, Brown and Beige, a 2022 collaboration set to another Ellington suite at The Grandel, music and dance are equal partners on stage. The evening starts with jazzy arrangements of various holiday tunes, with Ellington/Strayhorn taking up the second act. The latter features opulent sets and costumes transporting audiences to the midcentury epicenter of St. Louis nightlife: Gaslight Square. And there are no dancing mice or sugar plums in this Nutcracker.
“The story is inspired by the life of Billy Strayhorn,” says Douthit-Boyd. “This Nutcracker is his dream. I wanted to take a deeper dive into who he was as a human being.”
Born in Ohio and raised primarily in Pittsburgh, Strayhorn didn’t rise to the same level of fame as his closest creative partner, despite writing the Duke Ellington orchestra’s signature song, “Take the ‘A’ Train.” He also walked through life as an out, gay Black man. The ballet’s protagonist imagines a composer who dreams of writing a song for a legendary performer—here, none other than St. Louis native Josephine Baker.
“Why he did not get great credit during his lifetime is a question,” says Goines. “But now we have opportunities to build upon that and give him the recognition he’s deserved.”
Goines took the top job at Jazz St. Louis in 2022 after more than a decade as director of jazz studies at Northwestern University in Chicago. Prior to that, he led the jazz program at Juilliard and is a longtime member of both Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Wynton Marsalis Septet. In the subtext of this Ellington/Strayhorn Nutcracker is Goines and Douthit-Boyd’s interwoven histories in New York.
“I had the great fortune of dancing for several years in the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater,” says Douthit-Boyd. “Duke Ellington and Mr. Ailey had this tremendous relationship. I grew up dancing to this sound. So, it feels like it’s in me. These things go together. I feel the weight and significance of that.”
And Goines says their two storied institutions have no intention of making their partnership a one-off. They want audiences to count on this Ellington/Strayhorn every year.
“We’ve already begun the discussion of ‘how,’ not ‘would,’” he says. “The future is very bright.”
