The Chocolate Dance

The Chocolate Dance, also known as the Spanish Dance, is one of the divertissements in Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite.

Divertissements used to be very common in ballets. You'd have some serious story going on -- in the case of Nutcracker, a fairly epic battle between the forces of good and evil, or at least between rats and toys -- and all of a sudden the action would stop while some pretty dancing with lots of costume changes went on.

The major characters would be sitting around watching, or lying in fetching poses showing that whole thing was a dream sequence, or sometimes they were off the stage entirely, making no pretense that the intrusion of random dances with unrelated music made sense in the story. Often, the names of the dances printed in the program were the only clue.

In the Nutcracker, Clara visits the Kingdom of Sweets in a dream, and there are various dances symbolizing a variety of sweets, including chocolate. Chocolate, being historically connected with Spain, provides an opportunity to have a nominally Spanish dance, with some cool percussion reminiscent of castanets and a hint of flamenco in the arm movements.

The Chocolate Dance is part of a trio of divertissements. The others are Tea and Coffee, which may not be sweets, but are... ummm... things a person might drink while eating sweets.

One of the main rules of divertissements was that they didn't have to make much sense.