Staying on their toes

It’s “Nutcracker” season, and here are four young Houston Ballet talents to watch.

Houston Ballet’s lavish version of “The Nutcracker,” which artistic director Stanton Welch unveiled in 2016, contains enough characters to fill dozens of toy boxes: 45 mortals and 237 fantasy figures.

Clearly, it is about more than Clara, the Sugar Plum Fairy, the Nutcracker Prince and the Snow Queen.

All 61 of the company’s dancers and more than 100 academy students spring into action, but the 27-member corps de ballet does the most heavy lifting for the least amount of glory. They fill the stage with color and movement as party people, dancing dolls, ambassadors, a menagerie of fanciful animals and flowers — switching roles multiple times within each show, and from one show to the next.

Some will perform more than a dozen roles during this season’s 37-performance run — a head-spinning endurance test and a mental marathon. How do they remember who they are portraying from one minute to the next? Tchaikovsky’s music helps, as do Tim Goodchild’s elaborate and layered costumes, with their wigs, masks, props and custom shoes.

But each season, a few corps dancers and young soloists, most of whom are in their teens or early 20s, also get to try on leading roles during a matinee or two. That tradition, long a rite of passage, is one of the things that makes “The Nutcracker” special.

This season Tyler Donatelli will dance the Sugar Plum Fairy for the first time, in three performances, after covering it in rehearsals the past two years. She has already performed one of the other leads, Clara, and loved it. “I like trying to carry the audience along with the story,” she says.

On the rise since she was a star student of the Houston

Ballet Academy, Donatelli spent three years in the corps before becoming a soloist in 2017. A versatile, effervescent dancer, she has been a standout in works as varied as Justin Peck’s “Year of the Rabbit” and Welch’s “Giselle.”

To learn a little bit more about their lives on and off stage, we spoke with Donatelli and three corps dancers who also will perform new “Nutcracker” roles this season: Nutcracker Prince Chandler Dalton; Snow Flurry McKhayla Pettingill and Snowflake Gretel Batista.

They will also appear in Friday’s Jubilee of Dance, a onenight showcase that this year celebrates Houston Ballet’s 50th anniversary.

Amitava Sarkar / Houston Ballet Members of the company play many roles, such as Brian Waldrep and Nozomi Iijima swirling through “The Waltz of the Flowers,” in Stanton Welch’s “The Nutcracker.”