Daily Inspiration Quote by Matthew Bourne

Bourne isn’t describing a holiday bauble; he’s describing a childhood-scale horror prop that happens to be seasonal. Calling the Nutcracker “a dummy” does two things at once: it reduces the figure to an object (wood, paint, mechanism), then immediately re-animates it by obsessing over its mouth “moving like a nutcracker.” That seesaw between dead thing and almost-person is the engine of the fear. The terror isn’t that it’s alive; it’s that it’s not quite alive but behaves as if it’s trying.

As a dancer and choreographer, Bourne is wired to read bodies and motion as meaning. The mouth becomes choreography: a repetitive, mechanical gesture that suggests appetite, threat, or a programmed smile. “Pretty scary” lands deliberately casual, like someone embarrassed to admit how strong the reaction is, which only sharpens the authenticity. He’s pointing to the uncanny valley before using the term: the closer an object gets to human behavior, the more its wrongness announces itself.

The subtext is also artistic. Nutcrackers are usually framed as protective toys, symbols of tradition and comfort. Bourne flips that: tradition can feel coercive, even predatory, when it’s imposed with a fixed grin and clacking jaw. In the context of dance, where wooden rigidity is the opposite of living expressiveness, the Nutcracker becomes a perfect antagonist - a puppet that threatens to steal the dancer’s humanity, or a reminder that spectacle can be both enchanting and faintly menacing.