by Hannah Chang Foster | Dec 16, 2015 | Everything "Nutcracker", Profiles, TBT
In this clip from The Royal Ballet’s 2000 production of The Nutcracker, a 19-year-old Alina Cojocaru, now a principal with the English National Ballet, does the near impossible: she makes Clara’s adoration for a nutty-looking wooden doll appear genuine....
by Pointe Magazine | Dec 15, 2015 | Company Life
What do the Nutcracker and the circus have in common? A whole lot if you’re a dancer at Sarasota Ballet, where Matthew Hart has reimagined the holiday classic as John Ringling’s Circus Nutcracker. The whimsical production, which honors Sarasota as the...
by Amy Brandt | Nov 15, 2011 | Career, Everything "Nutcracker", Training
Timeless as it may be, The Nutcracker has undergone a number of face-lifts. Yet for all the changes in setting, story and characterizations, the Sugar Plum Fairy variation always looks the same—well, sort of. A loose blueprint of Lev Ivanov’s original...
by Elizabeth Kendall | Nov 17, 2010 | Company Life
Back in St. Petersburg in 1892, when those four courtier-artists (director Vsevolozhsky, composer Tchaikovsky, ballet masters Petipa and Ivanov) were concocting their magical grownup-child ballet The Nutcracker, no one could have dreamed that 100-plus years later...
by Theresa Ruth Howard | Oct 1, 2009 | Company Life
As I stood in Joyce SoHo’s rehearsal studio in New York clad in a black robe, cape, skull mask and six-inch platform boots, I tried desperately to steady myself in a wide second position as 12 “ghouls” crawled through my legs. Fighting with the...
by Nicole Peradotto | Dec 1, 2008 | Company Life
Audiences at Nashville Ballet’s new production of The Nutcracker may notice several unexpected guests at Clara’s Christmas party this year. Among those in attendance: the turn-of-the-century chancellor of Vanderbilt University and Lucille La Verne, a...
by Margaret Fuhrer | Nov 28, 2001 | Everything "Nutcracker", Profiles, TBT
It’s just not the holidays until you’ve watched the classic 1977 film of American Ballet Theatre in The Nutcracker—not least because the production stars the extraordinary Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland. PBS used to air it every December, but that...
by Jennifer Heimlich | Nov 28, 2001 | Company Life
Last night I got to see American Ballet Theatre in Alexei Ratmansky’s Nutcracker. I absolutely love this production. The choreography is thrilling, with psychological twists and an epic grand pas de deux. I’ll admit it: I even cried at the end. One...
