DANCERS EMBRACE HOLIDAY TRADITION
Nutcracker ballet forges dancers out of dreamers
Dancers love to complain about The Nutcracker, but it’s kind of like complaining about your family during the holidays.
After all, they perform it year after year after year after year, sometimes in four or five different cities.
A strong ballet company’s production of The Nutcracker turns dancers into the arts equivalent of NHL hockey players, shuttling between cities, dancing a bunch of performances, then jumping on a plane and travelling to the next place.
Consider the Alberta Ballet’s Kelley McKinlay and Jennifer Gibson, two of the company’s principle performers in this year’s Nutcracker.
The day they talk to the Herald, they’re a day removed from performing at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, and a day away from leaving Calgary to travel up to Edmonton for a run of the show there, prior to returning to Calgary to perform it at the Jubilee starting Dec. 20.
Can you say holy tight hamstrings, Batman?
“We get one day off (between Ottawa and Calgary rehearsal),” says Gibson, “and it definitely does not feel like enough time off. Jumping on a plane after doing a show is a little hard on your body — but a couple days in the studio and we should be good to go for Edmonton.”
For McKinlay, who recently danced the demanding role of Iago in Othello, as well as playing Elton (as in Elton John) in Love Lies Bleeding and many other major roles for the company, The Nutcracker is the dancer equivalent of how most of us feel about the holiday season. It’s fun, and as much of a holiday tradition as Christmas turkey, but maybe a little bit busier than one might normally want to be.
“The show itself isn’t overly demanding,” McKinlay says, “just because it’s so familiar to our bodies (but) it’s difficult on the body because we do a lot of double show days.
“This is a short run for us this year — normally we do four cities or five — so it ends up being 30 to 40 performances in the span of a month.”
What gets a tired, sore dancer through a ton of shows every holiday season is the fact that for both Gibson and McKinlay, the Nutcracker has been a part of their lives since they started dancing.
“My first Nutcracker was when I was nine years old,” says Gibson, who is dancing the role of Clara this year.
“And there have only been two years in the last 13 that I haven’t done it.”
For Gibson, The Nutcracker has been the marker by which she can measure her own evolution as a dancer.
“Every year you find something new to kind of motivate you,” she says, “whether it’s just a different take on a character, or trying to do every step a little bit better than last year.
“In that way it kind of evolved from when I was first a party girl way back when, then as a snowflake and flower — I idolized those dancers as a kid, and now I get to be one, so it’s fantastic, really.”
For McKinlay, the Fort Saskatchewan native who grew up in a family of five dancing children (known affectionately as the Von Trapp family of dance), there’s no way to separate The Nutcracker from his earliest holiday memories.
“My first Nutcracker with Alberta Ballet was when I was four years old, so it is now my 25th anniversary,” McKinlay says.
“I remember my first entrance actually,” McKinlay adds. “I was Baby Mouse — I was in the middle of the stage with three others, and I had to jump, run in a little circle, and run off — that was the extent of what I did, and I rehearsed for months!”
Now, McKinlay plays the Cavalier (as well as a few other char- acters), and says it’s important to live up to the kids in the cast the way the adult dancers did for him when he was a kid.
“I’ve grown up idolizing those dancers onstage, and who knew that one day I’d be in that position, looking at these little dancers idolizing me?” he says.
“Being onstage with those kids, you see how they look at you,” he says, “and that makes you want to dance harder and better every year. That’s the biggest thing that keeps me going.”
Similarity, for Gibson, Christmas always has — and (hopefully) always will — start with the show.
“The Nutcracker has always been pretty much my Christmas tradition,” she says. “It just wouldn’t feel the same without it, to be honest. I loved the show watching it in the audience, I love dancing it — it feels like Christmas for me. The tradition of Christmas for me begins with The Nutcracker.”