• Contributors
    • Catherine L. Tully, Owner/Editor
    • Dance Writers
      • Rachel Hellwig, Assistant Editor — Dance
      • Jessika Anspach McEliece, Contributor — Dance
      • Janice Barringer, Contributor – Dance
      • José Pablo Castro Cuevas, Contributor — Dance
      • Katie C. Sopoci Drake, Contributor – Dance
      • Ashley Ellis, Contributor — Dance
      • Samantha Hope Galler, Contributor – Dance
      • Cara Marie Gary, Contributor – Dance
      • Luis Eduardo Gonzalez, Contributor — Dance
      • Karen Musey, Contributor – Dance
      • Janet Rothwell (Neidhardt), Contributor — Dance
      • Matt de la Peña, Contributor – Dance
      • Lucy Vurusic Riner, Contributor – Dance
      • Alessa Rogers, Contributor — Dance
      • Emma Love Suddarth, Contributor — Dance
      • Andrea Thompson, Contributor – Dance
      • Sally Turkel, Contributor — Dance
      • Lauren Warnecke, Contributor – Dance
      • Sharon Wehner, Contributor – Dance
      • Ashley Werhun, Contributor — Dance
      • Dr. Frank Sinkoe, Contributor – Podiatry
      • Jessica Wilson, Assistant Editor – Dance
    • Dance Wellness Panel
      • Jan Dunn, MS, Editor
      • Gigi Berardi, PhD
      • James Garrick, MD
      • Robin Kish, MS, MFA
      • Moira McCormack, MS
      • Janice G. Plastino, PhD
      • Emma Redding, PhD
      • Erin Sanchez, MS
      • Selina Shah, MD, FACP
      • Nancy Wozny
      • Matthew Wyon, PhD
    • Music & Dance Writers
      • Scott Speck, Contributor – Music
    • Interns
      • Intern Wanted For 4dancers
    • Contact
  • About
    • About 4dancers
    • Advertise With 4dancers
    • Product Reviews on 4dancers
    • Disclosure
  • Contact

4dancers.org

A website for dancers, dance teachers and others interested in dance

Follow Us on Social!

Visit Us On YoutubeVisit Us On TwitterVisit Us On PinterestVisit Us On FacebookVisit Us On Instagram
  • 4dancers
    • Adult Ballet
    • Career
    • Auditions
    • Competition
    • Summer Intensives
    • Pointe Shoes & Footwear
      • Breaking In Shoes
      • Freed
      • Pointe Shoe Products
      • Vegan Ballet Slippers
      • Other Footwear
  • 4teachers
    • Teaching Tips
    • Dance History
    • Dance In The US
    • Studios
  • Choreography
  • Dance Wellness
    • Conditioning And Training
    • Foot Care
    • Injuries
    • Nutrition
      • Recipes/Snacks
  • Dance Resources
    • Dance Conferences
    • Dance Products
      • Books & Magazines
      • DVDs
      • Dance Clothing & Shoes
      • Dance Gifts
      • Flamenco & Spanish Dance
      • Product Reviews
    • Social Media
  • Editorial
    • Interviews
      • 10 Questions With…
      • Dance Blog Spotlight
      • Post Curtain Chat
      • Student Spotlight
    • Dance in the UK
    • Finding Balance
    • Musings
    • One Dancer’s Journey
    • Pas de Trois
    • SYTYCD
    • The Business Of Dance
    • Finis
  • Music & Dance
    • CD/Music Reviews

No Nutcracker…

December 12, 2020 by 4dancers

Emma Love Suddarth dances Spanish in The Nutcracker
Emma Love Suddarth dancing Spanish in The Nutcracker. Photo by Angela Sterling

by Emma Love Suddarth

“Monday—it’s finally Monday,” I think to myself.

From the day after Thanksgiving until the end of December, Monday means it’s a day off from The Nutcracker at Pacific Northwest Ballet (and likely most all American ballet companies as well). For once I don’t have to hear the rolling melody of the Waltz of the Flowers or the sultry notes of the mysterious Arabian Divertissement echoing through every crevice of the theater… and my head. I don’t have to look at the row of multiple costumes lined up behind the “Love Suddarth” tag on the costume rack. I don’t have to smell the fumes of hairspray and arnica gel wafting through the dressing room. 

I don’t have to think anything Nutcracker. 

Finally, I have a spare afternoon to grab some groceries for the week and to tackle the lengthy list of Christmas gifts I want to give! Then the inevitable happens. I’m in a department store, or the grocery store, and The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy comes twinkling over the loud speaker. “Aren’t they sick of this tune yet?” I think to myself irritably. Nope—just me, and a large number of fellow professional dancers out there. Through the month leading up to Christmas, ballet dancers live and breathe The Nutcracker—leaving the theater pretty much only to eat and sleep. Whether you love it or hate it, it’ll keep coming back every year. 

Snow Scene, Nutcracker
Emma Love Suddarth waiting backstage. Photo by Lindsay Thomas

That is until now. The Nutcracker is commonly the first ballet most dancers ever performed starting as youngsters, and it’s the “old faithful” that as professionals we can expect to roll around and linger for a month every year; so now, here in 2020, what will the holiday season look like without it for the first time since childhood? I ask myself—will I miss it?

Nutcracker is the double-edged sword of ballets—its innate holiday spirit, its dependable routine-ness, and its opportunities for both new and revisited roles are juxtaposed against its trudging monotony, its physical toll, and its seemingly-endless run. The beginnings of Nutcracker rehearsals signal the beginning of the holiday season—that first snow scene rehearsal on the schedule means it’s finally permissible to play Christmas music on your radio. And, after only a couple weeks of preparation—as opposed to the month or so for a normal rep—it seems easy to fall right into the routine of matinee-evening-all-weekend that we dancers dwell in for December. 

There is something comforting about knowing exactly what to expect for an upcoming performance week—or in this case the next six or so. When January comes, and we return to the schedule of a normal rep process it feels foreign. Somehow everyone is a little slower at picking up choreography because we’ve been executing the same steps on autopilot for the last month and a half straight. Then maybe, just maybe, we miss the dependability of knowing the matinee is a Snow/Marzipan show and the evening is Frau/Arabian—and it has been that way for years.

However, Nutcracker has a lot to offer to the growth of a dancer. It provides ample new stage opportunities for many dancers, and as the years go by, a chance to revisit certain roles over and over, digging deeper into them every time. The first ballet role I was ever cast in was “ginger cookie understudy” at the age of six. And, sure enough, I got my shot. One “cookie” got sick and gangly, pintsized Emma literally stepped into her shoes and got on stage. I took the ballet bait—I was hooked and have been dancing ever since. 

Years later, as a new corps member with the Pacific Northwest Ballet, one of the first principal roles I had the opportunity to perform was the iconic peacock in Kent Stowell’s and Maurice Sendak’s Nutcracker. Clad in a colorful unitard complete with a weighty peacock tail, I was overwhelmed with the same excitement as that little cookie, even with the nerves about the dreaded arabesque turns at the end of the variation. And, revisiting it year after year until PNB moved to Balanchine’s version, I continued to discover new moments I could let the mysterious persona of my particular peacock shine through.

Thirty shows into the run of Nutcracker though, the story has shifted. It’s hard to focus on that extra little bit of sass for your Spanish principal and instead you can’t shake the thought of the dinner sitting at home waiting for you once Act II is finished. “Just push through it—it’s only a couple minutes,” you tiredly think to yourself. Achilles throbbing from the precise intricacies of the matinee’s Marzipan footwork and a continuous headache from one too many hairpins securing your headpiece, you can’t imagine making it through fifteen more shows. The “Nutcracker tired” has hit you like a train. When will it end?

Over the intermission between Act I and Act II, you discover a pile of letters at your dressing room spot. These notes are written by the children you’ve been sharing the stage with throughout the run. Some have questions about life as a professional dancer, and some just want to say hello, but most are hoping for one of your dead pointe shoes that they can hold onto as a keepsake. 

The Nutcracker, Snow Scene
PNB’s Emma Love Suddarth, warming up for Snow in The Nutcracker. Photo by Lindsay Thomas

Later, you’re warming up for snow and a little mouse runs up from behind and hesitantly taps the edge of your tutu, “Thanks for the pointe shoe!” she blurts out excitedly before scurrying away. You barely get a chance to respond but you know the anxiousness because you’ve been there. There’s still a pair of Lauren Anderson pointe shoes in the closet of my old room at my folks’ house in Kansas—I know how special the gift of what I look at as just “smelly old shoes” is. I remember being that little mouse, and the uncontainable joy in every second that I got to skitter around the stage, and the overwhelming awe I felt at the holiday magic of THE NUTCRACKER. Somehow, after this momentary flashback, the spirited intro of the Spanish music brings a little holiday warmth to my heart, and my Achilles seems to hurt just a little bit less.

As someone who LOVES Christmas and all things surrounding the season, I think I resent Nutcracker each year on some level because I feel it robs me of my holiday entitlements. Christmas present shopping is rushed, decorating the house is squeezed in after a Sunday night show, and about five minutes into every holiday movie we turn on I am asleep. Why is my Christmas only the 25th—really just a glorified Monday—and everyone else gets a whole season? 

However, every single time as I walk out the backstage door after a show, I find myself running into little children dressed in their holiday best, holding tightly to their Nutcracker programs, leaping and twirling in the effort to recreate for their parents the magic they just watched up on the stage. This is my holiday spirit—more than the hot cocoa and twinkle lights. 

So yes, maybe this year I will appreciate getting to take my time hanging ornaments, or actually see the end of almost every Christmas film, but it won’t be the same without those young faces both onstage and off, glittering with excitement and overcome with holiday magic. For the first time in my life, I find myself admitting I’m glad to know that Nutcracker will come back. And, just this year, when I hear the steady rhythm of Waltz of the Flowers in the middle of Target, a little holiday warmth will flood my heart and a tiny smirk will creep onto my face.


Join Pacific Northwest Ballet to stream George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker® with the unique-to-Seattle scenery and costumes by Ian Falconer and immerse yourself in a candy-filled dreamland. Dates, times, and ticket information are available here.


Emma Love Suddarth
Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Emma Love Suddarth. photo by Lindsay Thomas.

Contributor Emma Love Suddarth is from Wichita, Kansas. She studied with Sharon Rogers and on scholarship at Pacific Northwest Ballet School, and attended summer courses at Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, Ballet Academy East, and Pacific Northwest Ballet School. She was first recipient of the Flemming Halby Exchange with the Royal Danish Ballet School and was also a 2004 and 2005 recipient of a Kansas Cultural Trust Grant. She joined Pacific Northwest Ballet as an apprentice in 2008 and was promoted to corps de ballet in 2009.

While at PNB, she has performed featured roles in works by George Balanchine, Peter Boal, David Dawson, Ulysses Dove, William Forsythe, Jiri Kylian, Mark Morris, Margaret Mullin, Crystal Pite, Alexei Ratmansky, Kent Stowell, Susan Stroman, and Price Suddarth. Some of her favorites include the Siren in Balanchine’s The Prodigal Son, Jiri Kylian’s Petit Mort, David Dawson’s A Million Kisses to My Skin, William Forsythe’s New Suite, and Price Suddarth’s Signature.

She is a contributor to Pacific Northwest Ballet’s blog. She is married to fellow PNB dancer Price Suddarth.

Filed Under: 4dancers Tagged With: Chrismas ballet, Christmas season dance, Emma Love Suddarth, nutcracker, pacific northwest ballet, Price Suddarth, the nutcracker

On Love, Ballet, And Sleeping Beauty

February 2, 2019 by 4dancers

Emma Love Suddarth
Emma Love Suddarth. Photo by Price Suddarth.

by Emma Love Suddarth

Emma LOVE? “Yeah I suppose it is a pretty great last name—thanks!” I can’t count the number of exclamations at the uniqueness of that last name. I can’t keep track of the number of love-themed gifts I received from secret santas over the years—not to mention the number of love-related puns I heard from friends, assuming they were the first. I never thought anything of it. It’s just a word after all, right? Saying goodbye to it as a last name five years ago (not to worry, it’s still there—just sandwiched as the middle now) made me think more on the word itself. As irony would have it, the very act of saying goodbye went hand-in-hand with the true weight of the word. It was an act of love.

More often than not, love is thought of through a fairytale-lens. Here at PNB we are currently deep in rehearsals for the iconic classic Sleeping Beauty—wicked fairies, sleeping kingdoms, flying nymphs, and one brave Price Florimund. It is only by true love’s kiss that he is able to defeat the wicked Carabosse and awaken the beautiful princess Aurora. Love is all-conquering. Even where the lovers might not “win”—Giselle, Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, to name a few—the love itself transpired effortlessly. According to many iconic movies, books, and songs, love is just a force that we are swept up into. It happens to us, whether or not we are truly aware.

sleeping beauty ballet
Pacific Northwest Ballet company dancers in Ronald Hynd’s The Sleeping Beauty, which PNB is presenting February 1 – 10, 2019. Photo © Angela Sterling.

Yes, love as an initial happening—i.e. “love at first sight”—may come about without direct intent. However, love in a deeper sense, as a continuous, ongoing force, is a decision. It requires participation. Think about anything you’ve ever loved. Pets? It might be hard to love them when they’re chewing up your favorite shoes or shredding your expensive new rug. But you choose to continue to. Ballet—or any other passion? It might be hard on those days when you just want to give up because you can’t execute a single step correctly. But you choose not to. A significant other? It might be hard when he or she makes you more frustrated than ever. But when you love that person in the fullest sense of the word—in a way that requires you as an active member—you continue to.

Along with the decision to continue something, comes the effort to maintain it. Relationships require work; passions require work; love requires work. For love to have moments of effortlessness, effort must be put in. Oxymoron much? One tangible metaphor to illustrate this idea is in ballet itself. As a dancer, think about the most special moments you’ve had on stage. I’ll speak candidly from a personal experience as the Siren in George Balanchine’s Prodigal Son. In one of the more iconic moments, slowly rising from seated atop the head of my coworker Matt—the son—to standing against the front of his shins, my feet not even touching the floor, I felt love; love of the character, love of the story, love of the music, love of ballet. That love felt effortless. However, thinking back on the process, the love wasn’t always natural. There was the constant pain of a golf ball-sized blister encompassing my entire heel. There were the numerous tears from rehearsals that felt like flops. There was the sheer exhaustion from hours and weeks of intense repetition. There was a continuous trail of blood, sweat, and tears that led to that point. When people say, “love is not easy,” I believe this is what they mean. More often than not, some of our most cherished moments experience a similar journey. That’s what makes them worth it. That’s what makes them precious.

Ultimately, we must allow for love. One of my favorite ideas about love comes from a C.S. Lewis quote, and addresses this very thought: “To love at all is to be vulnerable.” While it might seem initially defeating, vulnerability does not have to be a negative. Asking us to be vulnerable means asking us to be open—to be whole-hearted participants. In loving a person, we are opening ourselves up by placing our hearts in their hands, allowing them to play an equal part in the journey of that relationship. In loving a passion, we are opening ourselves up to critique and frustration, because through those can we learn to experience it at a deeper level and find greater appreciation for it. This “vulnerability” lays the foundation for growth, for depth, for richer love.

Watching PNB tackle ten intense studio runs of Sleeping Beauty this week brought many different forms of love to light. None of them were without intention. I watched ballet masters praise tired dancers at the end of the week for a job well done. I saw Auroras push through nerves, pain, even illness. I watched boyfriends and husbands pass snacks to their exhausted fairy-friend-nymph-etc. at every five-minute break. No, love is not easy. But it’s certainly beautiful.

And it’s certainly worth it.


See Pacific Northwest Ballet perform The Sleeping Beauty! Performances run from February 1st to February 10th.


Emma Love Suddarth
Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Emma Love Suddarth. photo by Lindsay Thomas.

Contributor Emma Love Suddarth is from Wichita, Kansas. She studied with Sharon Rogers and on scholarship at Pacific Northwest Ballet School, and attended summer courses at Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, Ballet Academy East, and Pacific Northwest Ballet School. She was first recipient of the Flemming Halby Exchange with the Royal Danish Ballet School and was also a 2004 and 2005 recipient of a Kansas Cultural Trust Grant. She joined Pacific Northwest Ballet as an apprentice in 2008 and was promoted to corps de ballet in 2009.

While at PNB, she has performed featured roles in works by George Balanchine, Peter Boal, David Dawson, Ulysses Dove, William Forsythe, Jiri Kylian, Mark Morris, Margaret Mullin, Crystal Pite, Alexei Ratmansky, Kent Stowell, Susan Stroman, and Price Suddarth. Some of her favorites include the Siren in Balanchine’s The Prodigal Son, Jiri Kylian’s Petit Mort, David Dawson’s A Million Kisses to My Skin, William Forsythe’s New Suite, and Price Suddarth’s Signature.

She is a contributor to Pacific Northwest Ballet’s blog. She is married to fellow PNB dancer Price Suddarth.

Filed Under: 4dancers Tagged With: Ballet, dancer, Emma Love Suddarth, george balanchine, Love, love of ballet, pacific northwest ballet, PNB, Price Suddarth, prodigal son, the sleeping beauty

Kylián Keyword: Connection

November 3, 2016 by 4dancers

Pacific Northwest Ballet Dancers
Emma Love Suddarth and her husband, Price Suddarth from Pacific Northwest Ballet

by Emma Love Suddarth

Connection. Between fingertips. Between one note and one arm. Between minds. Between spines. Between you and five other dancers spread across the stage. Between steps. Between dancer and audience. Between details. Between partners. Between souls.

The works of Jiří Kylián are set apart—and rightfully so. The atmosphere of complete intimacy they innately craft, both onstage amongst dancers and across the proscenium with the audience, is unique, and invaluable. At Pacific Northwest Ballet I’ve been lucky enough to perform two already—Sechs Tanze and Petite Mort—and, for the upcoming program Brief Fling, am working to add a third—Forgotten Land. These works hold special places in my heart, not only due to special opportunities, or incomparable partners, but largely due to the joy, trust, intimacy, and fearlessness they inherently create.

My first experience with the work of Kylián came and went in a blur. As a fairly new dancer in the company, simply learning one of the four women of Sechs Tanze was an unbelievable thrill. As a PNB “newbie,” I had no expectation of performing; nevertheless, I was drenched in sweat at the end of every rehearsal because, after all, who wouldn’t want to try being dragged across half the stage in a split, simultaneously going up and down like a carousel, or doing bicycle legs as fast as humanly possible in the air while laying on your partner’s back? It was hard to resist. Then, due to last minute injuries, I got a shot. However, this simultaneously exciting and potentially nerve-wracking experience was different than almost any previous or many since. [Read more…]

Filed Under: 4dancers Tagged With: ballerina, Emma Love Suddarth, forgotten land, Jiří Kylián, pacific northwest ballet, Peter Boal, petite mort, PNB, Price Suddarth, professional dancer, Sechs Tanze

Dance Artwork

Get Your Dance Career Info Here!

Dance ebook cover

Podcast

Disclosure – Affiliate & Ad Info

This site sometimes features advertising, affiliate marketing, or affiliate links, such as Amazon Associate links and others. When you click on these links, we get a small sum that helps to support the website operations. Thank you! There’s more detailed information on ads and our disclosure policy under the About tab in our navigation at the top of the site. We clearly mark any and all posts that contain these features.

Copyright Notice

Please note that all of the content on 4dancers.org is copyrighted. Do not copy, utilize, or distribute without express permission. We take cases of infringement seriously. All rights reserved ©2022.

Copyright © 2025 · Metro Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in