Here’s another installment of Patricia’s Nutcracker video journal! This time she reveals some Nutcracker secrets, chats with dancers and children during tech rehearsal and performances, and more fun backstage action!
Check back for more interviews and the last video journal.
We hope you enjoyed going behind-the-scenes of Nutcracker with Patricia Delgado. More backstage coverage will soon be posted. Until then, here’s a special treat! Patricia interviewed some of the dancers and our stage manager during her time in Naples.
Check back for more interviews and backstage action!
Post by Principal Dancer Patricia Delgado
It’s Nutcracker time again! This year marks the 20th Season that Miami City Ballet is performing George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker™.
Every year we kick-start our Nutcracker run in Naples, Florida. We pack up our cars and drive across Alligator Alley and hope that our Thanksgiving meals won’t weigh us down! I brought the “Flip cam” with me and tried to capture the spirit of Miami City Ballet’s first Nutcracker weekend of the 09-10 Season.
There is something very special about performing The Nutcracker. It is one of the only ballets in which the Company collaborates with children. Their enthusiasm is infectious. Even though some of us have been performing in The Nutcracker for years, for some of the kids, it is their first time out on stage. Watching their smiles light up as they dance reminds me what performing is all about and takes me back to when I was a kid, dancing the “hoops” and dreaming of one day being the Sugar Plum Fairy!
Being on the dancer’s side of things, I know how much time and effort it takes us to focus on our goal of performing as perfectly as possible. However, after running around the theater with the “Flip cam”, it truly made me realize what a huge team effort it takes to put on this show! I gained a whole new perspective. I hope you enjoy all of the different aspects of the theater…from the dancers to the stage manager, the lighting director, the crew and the makeup and wardrobe ladies.
The holidays are such a magical time of year and being a part of The Nutcracker magic just enhances the joy!
Post by Principal Dancer Deanna Seay
As a ballet student, you never think that the day will actually come when your career as a dancer might become a thing of the past. Caught up with the rigorous challenges of training, you are more anxiously conscious of wanting your career to begin. Then, you find yourself in a company, dancing every night, waking early to take class and rehearse, and time goes by. In the middle of it all, another ten years seem to be so much time to enjoy what you love to do, and with all the work to accomplish- the ballets to learn, the performances to prepare for, the endless strings of Nutcrackers, it doesn’t seem possible as you dance through your twenties and into your thirties that a career could ever end. Suddenly, though, the day comes when you realize it is time to move on, and you are left with years of memories, and the realization that time and careers do pass.
This is where I find myself at this moment, part way through my twenty-first season here with Miami City Ballet. I decided, a few months ago, that I would retire from the stage at the end of this season. I have spent the dancer’s equivalent of a lifetime here; indeed, I feel that, here, as an artist, I was “born,” grew up, matured, and am now facing what feels like the death of my life as a ballet dancer. Somewhere I read that dancers experience two deaths: the “death” of their careers and then their true death – and now I understand. Maybe death is a strong word, but for me, it acknowledges the completion of a journey and the chance to move on.
What can I say after two decades of dance? I have had an amazing time. I have been lucky to enjoy the career I have had- I am not sure it would have been this way anywhere else. I have been allowed to dance to the divine strains of Tchaikovsky more than my fair share, I think, as well as those of Stravinsky, Mozart, Delibes, Prokofiev, Ravel, Faure, Chopin and countless others. The music that moves our souls- I was granted the chance to dance to that- to live- to exist.
All of the ballets I will dance this year hold special meaning for me, and to be able to visit them again before I leave the stage is a special gift. And so I am looking forward to a season of little private moments of goodbye. Dancing my last performances of Company B and Allegro Brillante during the Kravis weekend, words such as,”…and this is the last time…” would float through my head, and the lump in my throat would start to swell. Each moment became a private goodbye to that part of my on-stage world. Bittersweet though it is, I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Deanna Seay in “Diamonds”. Photo by Steven Caras
The Nutman and the Mouse King come head to head on December 11-13 at Broward Center and December 18-20, 22-23 at Adrienne Arsht Center. For tickets to MCB’s production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker™ click here or call (877) 929-7010.
Christina is one of the students at MCB School who has been performing with the Company this Season. She moved to Miami just to attend the School and was presented with the opportunity to take the stage with our super human dancers!
Christina chatted with us about what is was like to relocate and how it feels to dance with Miami City Ballet.