Snowflakes, angels, toy soldiers and many more whimsical characters are taking the stage again this season in the University of Wyoming’s production of the holiday classic, The Nutcracker. The Nutcracker is a classic holiday ballet about a young girl that is given a nutcracker for Christmas that inspires quite an adventurous dream. The Nutcracker ballet only makes an appearance on the University of Wyoming campus every four years. The goal of having the ballet on campus every four years is to make it possible for students in their undergrad of a dance major to have the opportunity of performing such an elegant production; this goes for the orchestra members as well. After participating in rehearsals for twelve to thirteen weeks, all of the dancers and even the director are ready to have an audience and perform it for everyone to see. “Working on stamina has been challenging for me,” said Annaliese Ptacek, a junior dance performance major who plays the Sugarplum Fairy in the production, “the Sugarplum Fairy role has a lot of fluid arm movements, while at the same time the footwork is very precise.” Ptacek had said that learning techniques like those are as tough as “patting your head and rubbing your stomach”.
Although The Nutcracker is a reoccurring production that is present on campus, there is always room for changes and improvements. “A small pleasure for me would be that while I am directing about the same material I get to work with different dancers and get to see their different interpretations of the ballet,” said Marsha Knight, the director of the production. This is Knight’s seventh consecutive time directing the ballet. This year there are going to be several new and exciting changes to the dances, some scenic components, a few scenes and the costumes. Some of the new components include the Christmas tree that grows along with Clara’s dream and new cannons and spiral staircases in the battle scene.
The production reaches out to more groups of individuals than just the average fine arts loving crowd. “The show is fun and has a lot of different people in the show including dance majors, acting majors and even community members,” said Robert Chase Gerard, a sophomore International Studies major that plays the Nutcracker Prince in the performance. The Nutcracker reaches out to many people from different backgrounds because it is quite a large production. “Productions of this scale really aren’t staged in Wyoming,” said Quinn Scicluna, a senior majoring in Theatre and Dance and is the production stage manager, “Normally to see a big ballet like this you have to go to Denver, but all of our adult dancers here are training to be dance professionals, so it’s definitely a quality production.”
The Nutcracker will be performed starting December 11 through December 13 with a showing at 7:30 pm and then one last showing December 14 at 2:00 pm. The production will take place in the Arts and Sciences Auditorium and is seven dollars for students to attend.
