Bengt's Blog

It has been a busy week in the studio. We completed a draft of the first section of the dance between Lord and Lady Birch in the new Group of Seven Nutcracker (this is traditionally the Grand Pas de Deux danced by the Sugar Plum and her partner). It is very tough and looking at the whole, I am not so sure it will be possible for the dancers to go straight into their variations without collapsing. We’ll find out as we start to run it.

I also worked on completing several of the group dances in the party scene. In most of these dances, we use dance students to play the children. This make it a little bit more complicated to create as we only have the students for a very limited time every week. Many of the parts are first set on company members who then teach the children their parts but it always works best when you can create directly on the students. Young dance students simply move very differently from professional dancers, and you can connect the roles so much better if you create with children for children’s parts.

We have had a ton of costume fittings for the new production; sometimes it seems like all the dancers are at fittings! The costumes for raccoons are starting to take shape and there is always a back and forth process as we try to balance the needs of the designs with the realties of moving in them. Usually the less material and more freedom there is, the better for the dancers. We looked at the length of the raccoons’ tales so that they’re short enough that the dancers don’t step on them, but long enough to maintain the right look. I think we managed to get it right. Every costume usually poses questions: are the tutus too wide, or the men’s shirts to fluffy (material gets in the way of partnering)?; are the goggles too thick (you will have to guess what creatures are wearing goggles!) for the dancers to see out of?; will they steam up when they start to dance? There are a million questions that need to be answered and resolved before we are done.

We also continued to rehearse for Anastasia and had a performance in Guelph over the weekend. Cristina Tucciarone made her debut as Tatiana. It is great to see the dancers grow and mature into refined artists and it is always exciting when dancers go into new parts. We received a very nice letter from a patron who saw the production in Welland the previous weekend, describing how the production truly touched her. It really inspires us when we hear how much what we do means to people, it makes it all worthwhile.