St. Paul’s School will be serving up the most traditional of holiday dance performances – save for grandma after she gets into the peppermint schnapps – with the annual appearance of the Nutcracker for three shows this weekend.
The students of the St. Paul’s School Ballet Company will put on an hour-long abridged version of the show, The Nutcracker: Act II, in Memorial Hall on Dec. 13, 14 and 15, for the holiday friendly admission price of absolutely free.
Shows are Dec. 13 and 14 at 7:30 p.m. and Dec. 15 at 2 p.m. The house opens 30 minutes before each show.
“It’s a great holiday show, and it’s really great for families and kids, because our version is slightly shorter,” said Jennifer Howard, St. Paul’s director of dance. “We have some very, very good dancers. It’s a perfect way to kick off the holiday season. And it’s free.”
The abridged version is roughly an hour long – good for young people and those with short attention spans. Wait, what were we talking about? – and features primarily numbers from Act II, or “basically the snow scene,” Howard said. The shorter show provides greater appeal to families with younger children, and the numbers from Act II feature more opportunities for older dancers as opposed to the first two scenes in the first act, which feature primarily young children, Howard said.
All 20 students in the St. Paul’s ballet company will have a role in the show, as will eight children of St. Paul’s faculty members between 5 and 9 years old, who will play the angels (insert parents proudly proclaiming that their children have been typecast).
The Nutcracker is a long-standing tradition at St. Paul’s, though it has moved around a bit over the last decade or so. After taking place on campus for many years, it moved to the Capitol Center for the Arts for a few winters before returning to St. Paul’s, where it has been for the last two years.
That’s where Howard, a 1992 graduate of St. Paul’s, has the fondest memories of the show, having performed in it during her time as a student.
“My memory is it was the hottest ticket. When I came back in 2010, that was when they did it at the Capitol Center, and it had completely changed,” Howard said. “It wasn’t on campus, it involved more people that weren’t students of St. Paul’s. The decision was made through the administration that it wasn’t really for St. Paul’s students anymore, it had gotten too big, so the (following year) we did it here on campus.”
Hosting the shows on campus also provides Howard an opportunity to open the public’s eyes to the dance program as a whole at St. Paul’s. She already has shows planned for February and the spring that feature the works of celebrated choreographers, and is hoping the Nutcracker is enough to whet the audience’s appetite for those upcoming performances, which are also free.
“At least from a dance program perspective, I want people to come and see what’s happening,” Howard said. “It’s not just the Nutcracker, but we have two other shows in Feburary and the spring where we’re bringing in a lot of modern and contemporary choreographers. If we can get people to start coming for the Nutcracker, then they can come see these famous choreographers work for nothing. The goal is to not only educate the St. Paul’s community about dance, but to give the surrounding area the opportunity to be educated in dance.”
The spring show will feature pieces by celebrated choreographer Paul Taylor, as well as St. Paul’s alum and veteran of the New York City ballet, Philip Neal. The February show, meanwhile, will highlight the work of Diane Coburn Bruning and Twyla Tharp.
In the short term, though, the focus is on the Nutcracker. Because it appeared at the Capitol Center and then vanished again, many people around town have thought the annual show had stopped, Howard said, rather than just returning to St. Paul’s. She’s hoping to draw a strong audience this year as she and the ballet company work to restore the tradition to its glory days.
“I have really fond memories as a student here of having these incredibly full houses of people that weren’t just St. Paul’s students. I’d like to bring it back to that level,” Howard said. “We never stopped doing it, but because we stopped doing it at the Capitol Center, there was a misunderstanding that it hadn’t been happening. We’re hoping to get it back to that place where a lot of people come from the surrounding area. It’s free, and it’s great for them to come to campus.”
