Dance

Nutcracker has bigger cast of children, smaller venue

The annual Ballet Arkansas production of The Nutcracker gets a new look and a new home this year as it moves to the Maumelle Performing Arts Center.
The annual Ballet Arkansas production of The Nutcracker gets a new look and a new home this year as it moves to the Maumelle Performing Arts Center.

The mice will wage war. The snowflakes will frolic. The Sugarplum Fairy will make everything come out sweet in the end. The Nutcracker, that perennial Christmas production, won't change that much. But it will look a little bit different this year.

Thanks to the renovation work at Robinson Center Music Hall, the annual Ballet Arkansas-Arkansas Symphony Orchestra joint production has moved to the Maumelle Performing Arts Center, something that has brought some technical challenges with learning new lighting and sound systems, says Ballet Arkansas Executive Director Karen Bassett.

The Nutcracker

7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, Maumelle Performing Arts Center, 100 Victory Lane, Maumelle

Tickets: $20-$52

(501) 666-1761

balletarkansas.org

With a cast of 218 dancers, that also creates some logistical complications managing traffic backstage in the new venue, particularly when some of those cast members are as young as 6 years old.

This year they have the largest cast of local children and youth dancers they've ever had. So many auditioned that they've double-cast more of the young roles than ever before.

"Everybody in Little Rock has got to be one degree or two degrees of separation from somebody in the cast," Bassett says. "Our ballet is definitely a community ballet. That's a tradition with Ballet Arkansas and we love that."

They're also dealing with a smaller venue -- capacity 1,200 as opposed to Robinson's 2,600.

"It is a smaller house," Bassett says. "It will be a little more intimate feel, I think, for everybody. But the symphony will still be playing. We haven't changed anything about that."

Regular Nutcracker viewers will notice a few other changes, but they're not happening because of the move.

There will be some tweaking here and there to the choreography, but one of the biggest changes is the Russian Dance scene.

"We're using the choreography created by the brothers who first brought The Nutcracker to the United States," Bassett says. "That's the choreography they created for the San Francisco Ballet in the first Nutcracker that was ever done in the U.S."

It's also the choreography familiar to Artistic Director Michael Bearden from his time with Salt Lake City's Ballet West.

"We had been bringing in a guest artist or two for 'Russian' and this year we decided to use our company members for that," Bassett explains. "One of the guest artists we had used was very good at acrobatics and none of our company members are. We needed to change the choreography based on the dancers we were using."

More obvious changes will be in the sets and backdrops, which the company has always rented.

"This year we're trying to build up our own inventory some," Bassett says, explaining that they've created or purchased props and sets for the show. The backdrops are still rented but they're from a different company.

"We're migrating to hopefully at some point having the financial wherewithal to actually design and have built for Ballet Arkansas our own backdrops."

The Nutcracker is not only an artistic highlight for the company, as Ballet Arkansas' biggest fundraiser of the year, it's also a financial high point. Despite the smaller house, they haven't raised the ticket prices. Instead, they've added a Saturday matinee, hoping to sell their normal number of tickets.

"We think seeing at least one [ballet] should be on everybody's bucket list," Bassett says. "If they're going to see only one, typically the one most people would go to would be The Nutcracker."

Weekend on 12/11/2014

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