The Nutcracker. Music by P.I. Tchaikovsky. Queensland Ballet. Choreography by Ben Stevenson. .Canberra Theatre Centre and Queensland Ballet. The Canberra Theatre. November 23-27. Tickets at canberratheatrecentre.com.au.
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Whether it's watching re-runs of Miracle on 34th Street and Love Actually, eating fruit mince pies, stretching the household's electricity supply with outlandish lighting displays, or just spending time with family, most people have something that screams Christmas to them.
For Li Cunxin, it's The Nutcracker.
Like many, for the former internationally renowned ballet dancer, the festive season is all about the fairytale of Clara and her adventures to the The Land of Sweets, and the unmistakable strains of Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.
Li has fond memories of the ballet - both watching it in the audience and performing in it as he rose through the ranks of ballet. He's lost track of how many times he's seen it - "one year I counted I did over 40 performances, in one month virtually, so more than one a day".
But he could have quite easily never have even come across the ballet. His background is well-known, thanks to his autobiography Mao's Last Dancer, which shot to the top of the Australian best seller list when it was released in 2003, and was later turned into a blockbuster film.
Born into extreme poverty in China, Li was selected to study ballet at Madame Mao's Beijing Dance Academy by a delegation that came to his school when he was only 11. After seven gruelling years of training, he was discovered by the head of the Houston Ballet, and in 1979 became one of the first two cultural exchange students allowed to go to America to study under Chairman Mao's regime. Following a dramatic defection to the US, he danced with the Houston Ballet for 16 years and became one of the world's top ballet dancers.
Having come from living under the communist Mao regime, he recalls stepping foot in the United States as akin to, "walking onto the moon for the first time".
"It was all bit of shock for me that trip - everything was an eye-opener."
And it was during that first year abroad that he saw The Nutcracker for the first time.
"Even hearing the Tchaikovsky music it was such a shock because in China during my time, [it] was all Mao's revolutionary tunes and music - the songs and ballets were all revolutionary with very [little] of the western influence," he says.
"But Nutcracker really took me on a journey. The music, the story, the audience reaction, the dancing - it is just such a fairy tale story. And that made me realise [it] was such a festive ballet that can just bring the families together."
These days, Li is based in Brisbane, where he lives with his wife and three kids, and works for the Queensland Ballet. When he joined the company in 2012, it was his vision that the company perform The Nutcracker every Christmas as a tradition, a feat no other Australian company has done.
This will be the Queensland Ballet's fourth year in a row of the performance - which sells out without fail in Brisbane every year - and for the first time, it's going on the road for one interstate performance in Canberra.
So what brings people out year after year to see the same ballet they've seen time and time and time again? For Li, The Nutcracker has a magical combination of music, story and dancing like no other.
"I have danced this production since 1979 virtually every year until I came to Australia and finished my dancing career," he says.
"But even when I sit in the audience and watch them performing, in Melbourne or Sydney or anywhere else without me dancing or physically involved in the production, I still loved it. I still absolutely loved it. If I had to count how many times I would've watched this in a production, it would be several hundred times. And I'm still not tired of it."
Li's own production includes his own special touches, with "magical elements" that he's keeping under his hat, but promises will delight younger theatre-goers. For the Canberra performance, they've even selected some local children as part of the ensemble - a serious coup for the young dancers chosen.
"We often see actually three generations coming to see this ballet, enjoying it together, because there's not many stories or theatrical experiences three generations can actually sit together and enjoy," he says.
"Nutcracker's one of these productions, I think, that on different levels you can truly enjoy. It can really capture the imagination of three generations - they all get some enjoyment, they all get some wonderful experience out of it. So when they walk out, all of them are smiling."
