The Nutcracker Ballet
Chiara Ajkun’s The Nutcracker transforms a beloved holiday ballet into a timeless journey of childhood wonder, family memory, classical beauty, and imagination.
Choreographed by Chiara Ajkun for Ajkun Ballet Company
A child falls asleep on Christmas night.
Perhaps she dreams. Perhaps her favorite uncle really can perform magic. Perhaps the snow carries her somewhere beyond the world she knows.
Chiara Ajkun does not tell us which.
Her Nutcracker invites audiences into an extraordinary adventure while offering another world of memory, beauty, imagination and possibility to those who choose to look more deeply.
Perhaps You Don’t Know This Nutcracker
As a principal dancer performing the Sugar Plum Fairy, Chiara Ajkun found herself returning to one question: how had such a dark and unsettling story become one of the world’s most beloved ballets?
E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King is far stranger than the cheerful Christmas tradition most audiences know today. Its young heroine is Marie. There is a seven-headed Mouse King, a cursed and disfigured prince, a violent battle, a severe injury, fever and an unsettling world in which fantasy and psychological dread easily cross into one another.
How had this peculiar German literary tale traveled so far that it eventually became one of ballet’s most beloved holiday traditions—and, for generations of children, an introduction to the art form?
The transformation fascinated her.
A Timeless Nutcracker
Chiara Ajkun's Nutcracker is rooted in classical tradition, yet free to evolve with the world around it—allowing ballet, as a living art form, to continue its natural course.
The family still gathers at Christmas. Beautiful toys come alive. Clara enters a world of snow. Flowers waltz. Ballerinas wear tutus. The great classical dances remain.
But the world around them feels emotionally recognizable today.
The party needs neither toy weapons to define the boys nor manufactured sibling conflict to move the story forward. Costumes preserve the elegance and fantasy of classical ballet without fixing the family inside one historical moment.
And Drosselmeyer is no longer a dark or sinister stranger.
He is Clara’s favorite uncle.
The Uncle Every Child Would Want
Ajkun’s Drosselmeyer is funny, loving, protective—and capable of magic.
Childhood is already filled with magical adults: the mother who somehow makes every hurt better, the father who can defend his little princess from every monster, and the favorite uncle who brings extraordinary toys and always seems to know where the next adventure begins.
At the Christmas gathering, Clara’s fantasy begins and Uncle Drosselmeyer opens the door, accompanying her through the extraordinary world ahead—a companion, guide and protector in a child’s life.
When the Mice Come Looking for Christmas
In most traditional versions of The Nutcracker, the mice are designed to create fear and conflict. For Ajkun, that felt at odds with the ballet’s role as an introduction to dance for very young audiences—and, for that matter, with its festive spirit.
Her mice are hungry, clumsy, chaotic and wonderfully acrobatic—complete with long tails and cheese—and just as entertaining for adults as they are for children.
The familiar battle between the Nutcracker Soldier and the Mouse King remains, but dancing carries the excitement.
Jumps, turns and tumbling transform the conflict into theatrical motion, while the mice sweep through the scene like an unruly gang cheering on the action.
They are mischievous, occasionally touching, and never meant to frighten.
The story remains.
Dance simply finds another way to tell it.
Clara Goes Somewhere Wonderful
Clara falls asleep.
She may be dreaming.
Her uncle may truly possess magic.
She may be traveling through imagination, time or somewhere else altogether.
Ajkun offers possibilities rather than answers.
Suddenly, snowflakes whirl around Clara, until the Snow Queen and King emerge and the journey gives way once again to pure classical dancing.
The Sugar Plum Fairy and Cavalier strikingly resemble Mom and Dad.
Perhaps familiar people have followed Clara into another world. Perhaps the resemblance means nothing more than a beautiful theatrical echo. Perhaps Ajkun simply wanted to imagine that Tchaikovsky’s grief over the sudden loss of his sister, while The Nutcracker was taking shape, could find some measure of solace in an imaginary reunion.
“To me, the body says what words cannot.” — Martha Graham
The Defining Voice of Modern Ballet
Chiara Ajkun
Distant Lands, Then and Now
For modern ballet creator Chiara Ajkun, the divertissements offered another possibility: to keep The Nutcracker’s imaginary journey while allowing each traditional dance to reflect the culture it represents.
Ajkun brings in specialist consultants, professional dancers trained in the specific styles, and artisans to recreate the cultural language expressed through the dances and costumes.
-
Chinese Dance: Alison Chen, formerly a principal dancer with Shen Yun.
-
Russian Dance: George Goderdzishvili, formerly of the Igor Moiseyev Ballet.
-
Spanish Divertissement: Maria Del Mar, formerly of Ballet Nacional de España.
-
Mother Ginger: Skilled acrobats recreate the rich acrobatic performance culture that flourished in nineteenth-century Europe.
The journey in The Nutcracker becomes more than fantasy: it becomes an encounter with the movement, artistry, and visual traditions of different cultures.
A Beautiful Ballet Is Worth Preserving
The architecture of grand classical ballet is magnificent in its athleticism, elegance, musicality and artistry.
| The Ballerina Doll | The Nutcracker
| The Snowflakes | The Waltz of the Flowers
| The Pas de Deux | The Variations
For the connoisseur, there is virtuosity and refinement to savor.
For a first-timer, something equally meaningful may happen before any of those qualities can be named: an emotional encounter with magic, where proportion, line and movement create a sense of wonder that does not end with the performance.
The Nutcracker: A Ballet of Family and Memory
For Ajkun, theater has always been intertwined with family. She fell in love with ballet at three years old, brought to performances by parents and grandparents who loved music, opera and dance.
That early experience shaped a lasting belief: very young audiences do not need a lesser version of ballet. They can be given beauty, music, imagination and extraordinary dancing long before they understand the technique behind it.
The Nutcracker makes that idea especially fitting. Families gather, children discover something for the first time, and adults return to traditions already filled with memory.
Her production unfolds in approximately 75 minutes, allowing movement to carry the narrative while preserving the classical dances at its heart.
Let the wonder of ballet plant seeds of grace and strength that bloom for a lifetime.
The Nutcracker
at First
For Chiara Ajkun, creating her own Nutcracker became an exercise in distillation—a process of weighing the monumental traditions of her past against the possibilities of the present.
Having performed Yuri Grigorovich’s Nutcracker under the coaching of Ekaterina Maximova, and later experienced George Balanchine’s neoclassical approach through Alexandra Danilova, she had encountered two distinctly different traditions within the same ballet.
What was still left to say?
She returned to Hoffmann’s strange German story, to Tchaikovsky’s score—with its capacity to hold joy, memory and loss at once—and to the question of what generations of artists had made worth preserving.
An exceptionally long evening at La Scala crystallized another thought: the grandeur of traditional theater did not depend upon its duration.
Lengthy pantomime could give way to movement. The narrative could move more swiftly. The great classical dances could remain untouched at its heart. And the divertissements could draw upon artists who carried the movement and visual traditions of the cultures they represented.
The answer was not simply a shorter Nutcracker, but a living classic capable of evolution—honoring its classical heritage while opening new doors to a contemporary audience.
Chiara Ajkun’s The Nutcracker preserves its timeless beauty for both the seasoned balletgoer and the curious newcomer.
Production History
Commission: Originally commissioned in 2007 by Dr. Domenic D. Guastaferro, Supervisor of Performing and Visual Arts Education for the City School District of New Rochelle, as a professional ballet production for the New Rochelle community.
Premiere: Linda Kelly Theater, New Rochelle, New York.
Collection: The Classics — classical repertory preserved through Chiara Ajkun’s choreography.
Presentations: Performed by Ajkun Ballet Theatre in New Rochelle from 2007–2021, and currently presented in New York City and Westchester County.
Explore the Ajkun Ballet Theatre Collection
To further discover the artistic world of Chiara Ajkun and the company, please visit the following authoritative resources:
⟩ The Creator: About Chiara Ajkun, Creator of Modern Ballet
⟩ The Originals: The Originals Collection & Original Art
⟩ Official Home: Ajkun Ballet Theatre Official Website
⟩ Performances: Current Performances by Ajkun Ballet Theatre
⟩ Support Creativity: Creativity Matters! Supporting the Creation of Original Ballet and New Art
Artistic Note. Chiara Ajkun’s The Nutcracker bridges the grandeur of classical tradition with a vibrant, living theatricality. By distilling convention, honoring the emotional truth of Tchaikovsky’s score, and bringing authentic cultural voices into its traditional divertissements, Ajkun has revitalized a holiday cornerstone though a unique vision distinctly ahead of its time. The production speaks with immediacy and grace to each new generation, reaffirming the timeless power of classical dance through the language of modern ballet —a language in which cultures converse, each bringing its own distinct voice to the audience.