Christmas Eve

Sorry Guys....I haven't been doing the best job! I'm so busy. This is my Christmas Post


Looking for something fun to do on Christmas Eve?

Make some hot chocolate and gather your family together around the television for a performance of "The Nutcracker!"

But this isn't just any performance; it is the winner of Ovation TV's Battle of the Nutcrackers: World Games contest.

Earlier this month, host Susan Jaffe, former dancer with American Ballet Theatre, presented viewers with five different versions (from five different nations!) of the classic story: Mark Morris' "The Hard Nut" (USA), Bolshoi Ballet's "The Nutcracker" (Russia), Maurice Bejart's "Nutcracker" (France), Casse Noisette Circus: Ballet of Monte Carlo (Monaco), and Royal Ballet's "The Nutcracker" (UK).

Viewers then cast their vote!

Which version is YOUR favorite?

To get in the Nutcracker spirit, tune in to Ovation TV this Thursday, December 24 at 8 p.m. ET/PT and don't miss the Christmas Day marathon featuring all five Nutcrackers starting at 8 a.m. ET/PT.


Do you guys have a favorite Version of the Nutcracker?

I want to hear about it.

I love the Royal Ballet's
Boston Ballet's
Ballet of Monte Carlo's
And of course our local one, Albany Berkshire Ballet's



I don't often find things online about ABB but I found this one. Written about the 2007 performance;


I wonder what Pablo Picasso, that believer in the artistic brilliance of any child, would have thought of The Nutcracker. To learn a technique, he knew, is to bind the soul. Late in life, he described his career as a process of disentanglement. (What tangles!)

Similarly, classical ballet is sometimes made into a rigid sport. It can constrict enjoyment in favor of perfection, alienating many in the process.

By transcending those divisions, The Nutcracker became the world’s favorite ballet. It’s hard to find a version whose children don’t remind an audience of the joys found in haphazard beauty, and whose adults aren’t clearly in it for the children.

The execution of a Nutcracker’s core elements—antique togetherness, indoor snow, rousing and virtuous wonder—will vary, especially across the 115 years since its premiere by the Kirov Ballet in St. Petersburg, Russia. Across those decades, constancy has come from a production’s younger set, moving at their unscripted best, and from those who, like Picasso, have spent a lifetime learning how to move as if unscripted.

A few weeks ago, the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington hummed with such unscripted moments, at a dress rehearsal for the Albany Berkshire Ballet’s 33rd annual production of The Nutcracker.

From the orchestra section, a small blond girl watched a teenager rise up onto her new-looking pointe shoes, and said quietly, “That’s so cool! She just stays there.” A smaller girl asked the first, “Hopefully you didn’t forget your ballet shoes, right?” The first followed her optimistic reply with a very long pause, then, “I’m wearing them right now.”

Footwear confirmed, these girls and a dozen more were called onstage by Jane Yablonsky, a petite member of the Albany Berkshire Ballet and once a student, like many here, of its Pittsfield academy, the Cantarella School of Dance. “Miss Jane,” as the students called her, reminded them of their rows and called out orders while lanky Clayton Teal hammed up his part as Mother Ginger for all the moms watching.

Soon, raucous music apulse, Teal entered in his character’s enormous hoop skirt. What a quasi-mythological oddity: dozens of grown children are birthed by a man in drag only to be swallowed up whole again. The smuggled child-clowns veered around the stage, and jumped by launching their chests into the air. Miss Jane called out once and the action halted. How well children listen when the subject is one they enjoy, and when they are known by adults to enjoy it.

Great Barrington native Charlotte Ernst, 6, took time out from destroying a few of the Mahaiwe’s preciously renovated seats to discuss her role as a reindeer in The Nutcracker. In her favorite sequence of the ballet, a sleigh pulled by Ernst and her fellow reindeer (and more effectively pushed by a Snow Prince) ferries Clara through a blizzard to the Kingdom of Sweets. (There, a series of sets by Carl Sprague culminates in a stunning, peachy homage to Western classicism—this backdrop is worth the ticket price alone.) Ernst was clear on her future as a ballerina, although she admitted world-wearily, “Yes, I’m going to be millions of things when I grow up!”

Later, with the casual gesture one uses to make others aware of a celebrity, Ernst drew attention to Lindsey Jacquer, who played Clara in her same cast. Wispy and eloquent, Jacquer immediately named her own favorite scene: that sleigh trip into the Kingdom of Sweets. To ward off some difficulty in keeping her smile for the ballet’s duration, she confessed to pretending occasionally that her sleigh’s journey is real. “It really feels like you’re in a dream.” The cast members climbed onstage. With a gaze somewhere between rehearsal and showtime, Jacquer slid along, marveling at imaginary snow, while Ernst tugged away.

The following week’s performance, at the Colonial Theater in Pittsfield, was thick with the excitement of a microculture in full swing. Just as the holidays aren’t complete until those families get their Nutcracker, many small dance studios—and quite a few larger companies—would have trouble financing the coming year without such a series of winter showings.
Three generations of one such family, led by Ralph Stroffolino, have attended the Albany Berkshire Ballet’s Nutcracker annually for twenty years. All six were excited to see Jane Yablonsky in many major roles that night; they’ve watched her grow as a dancer since she played a lamb alongside Stroffolino’s granddaughters in a Nutcracker long ago.

And how she has grown: delicate but not fragile, she bounded through difficult steps with the fresh eyes of discovery. Technique only gave shape to spontaneity. It’s a reasonable guess that Yablonsky, like most in the company and an equal percentage in North American ballet companies, learned how to dance in The Nutcracker, testing their bodies over decades with pantomime, comedy, and all levels of derring-do.

Young chaos kept the Colonial show just brilliant enough. Picasso would have loved it.


(http://walkaroundtime.wordpress.com/2008/09/27/a-delicious-chestnut/)

More to come