On Their Toes Local Dance School Students Cap Months Of Hard Work By Performing Alongside Professionals In ‘The Nutcracker’

So what if the dress rehearsal was a half-disaster? That happened three hours ago. It’s history, along with the two months of rehearsals that came before.

At this moment, 11 minutes before the curtain rises on opening night Thursday, all 68 students in this madhouse of a dressing room are concentrating, with the single-mindedness of soldiers going into battle, on what happens next.

They’ll be dancing “The Nutcracker” before a crowd of nearly 2,600. The Albert Ballet provides the flashy professional dancers. The Spokane Symphony provides the Tchaikovsky. Yet Spokane’s dance schools provide this ballet’s foot soldiers, not to mention its Toy Soldiers, Mice and Lambs. These students, ages 10-17, make up about two-thirds of the manpower of this ballet.

Right now, Peggy Goodner is feeling the weight of that responsibility. She’s in charge of the students, and at dress rehearsal, three hours ago, the battle scene was more or less a rout. Cannons didn’t fire, soldiers got lost, entire platoons failed to take the field.

But now the problems have been talked through and solutions devised. Optimism is high, and so is the noise level.

“Break a leg! You’re gorgeous!” 13-year-olds shout to each other across the room.

William Thompson, Alberta Ballet ballet master, arrives right before curtain, gathers the girls around and says, “You did a terrific job in the dress rehearsal just to get up on that stage for the first time and do it. Now you know what you’re in for. Go out there and be awesome!”

He exchanges high-fives with some nearby Mice, and everybody screams.

Whitney Cover, 12, dancing the role of Clara, and Hillary Eaton, 11, dancing the role of Fritz, head down the stairs and stand in the wings as the overture winds down.

Both girls bounce up and down and practice little dance steps. Occasionally one or the other will say, “I’m fine!” in a voice that marches upward in the scale.

“Are your feet warmed up?” asks Goodner.

They nod.

“Did you warm up your smile?”

They both smile.

It is now T-minus 10 seconds. Clara stands poised to race on stage, Fritz behind her. Three, two, one, NOW! Clara sprints onstage, but Fritz burns rubber, slips, skitters and….

Let’s time-travel back to Nov. 1, to a cavernous, echoing dance studio on Sprague Avenue.

A few dozen young dancers sprawl on the hardwood. Goodner, director of Spokane’s Ballet Arts Academy, is addressing a clutch of Chinese dancers, who look decidedly un-Chinese with their blond hair and sweats.

“Remember, the central part is danced by a company dancer whom we won’t even see until opening night,” she warns the girls. “So we’ll just have to use a stand-in.”

One girl stands in the middle, representing the missing company dancer. Goodner keys the music on a boombox. The other dancers leap and twirl around her. Awkward, yes, but the girls at least get a feel for the timing of the piece.

Goodner watches with furrowed brow, then gathers the dancers together.

“The entrances and exits have to be really fast,” says Goodner. “You need to get her out of there or there will be this huge painful pause after the audience quits applauding.”

The girls look at each other. Applause? What applause?

Standing in this empty studio, it’s hard to believe that there will be applause at all, much less from 2,600 sets of hands. It’s hard to believe there will even be costumes.

“Lambs, we won’t be able to see your faces at all,” says Goodner, critiquing the young dancers who have just finished miming their way through the lamb scene. “Those facial expressions won’t show under those masks.”

Yet the dancers, as young as they are, seem surprisingly blase about the prospect of appearing on the Opera House stage in just a little over a month. For one thing, many of them have been through the entire experience before.

“This is my fourth time,” said Kristy Thompson, 12, a Lamb. “I’m not nervous. I’ve been in a lot of performances. You can’t even see the audience anyway.”

“I’d rather be doing it right now,” said Meaghan LaPrath, 15, who danced the role of Clara one year and now is one of Momma Ginger’s children. “We’re ready.”

The “Nutcracker” experience began for them a month before, on Sept. 28, when they auditioned at Spokane Falls Community College. A representative of Alberta Ballet watched a parade of 80 hopeful students. When it was all over, 68 students from 13 different dance schools won roles. All were girls except for one lone boy, Henry McNulty, 10, who will be a Mouse.The students then embarked on two months of once-a-week mandatory rehearsals.

The Alberta Ballet essentially leaves Goodner on her own for those two months. She uses a video of the show to teach the choreography, but otherwise her only tool is her 15 years of experience as the local “rehearsal assistant,” a woefully inadequate term to describe the magnitude of her job.

In a nutshell (pardon the expression) her job is to prepare 68 kids to walk right in on opening night and perform at a professional level.

“It’s hard without the dancers and costumes and props,” says Goodner. “Some kids actually have horses that they ride, strapped to their shoulders. They don’t work with those until dress rehearsal. The reason it works with children is that they have such great imaginations. You describe it to them, and they can imagine it.”

Momma Ginger’s children are the most advanced students. They must blaze through a brief whirlwind of dance after emerging from under Momma Ginger’s skirts. Here in rehearsal, there is no Momma Ginger and no skirt. But they can still sprint through their almost non-stop series of leaps. When it’s over, they gather around Goodner, stooped over, hands on knees, breathing heavily.

“If nothing else, you’ll have a lot of stamina by the time of the performance,” says Goodner.

They will be on stage only two minutes. Few in the audience will realize how much work has gone into those two minutes.

“For every minute of stage time, it takes about two hours of choreography and four hours of rehearsal just to learn it,” says LaPrath.

Goodner herself is sounding exhausted by the time performance week finally arrives. Yet she still is convinced that the work is worth it.

“I look forward to it every year, because there is no other opportunity like this for children in Spokane,” she says. “I see it as a chance for the students to get up close and personal with a professional ballet company. Sometimes they become permanently smitten with the idea of theater and the arts.”

The proof will be right there onstage, in the “Dance of the Flowers.” One of Goodner’s former students, Sara Morrison, will be dancing in that scene as an apprentice member of the Alberta Ballet’s roster.

“The cycle keeps continuing,” says Goodner.

Even the youngest and most heedless students catch the excitement as performance week arrives.

“By the time they get to the Opera House, it really sinks in,” says Goodner. “They are doing something extraordinary.”

Now, we’re at the Opera House for the one and only dress rehearsal, the afternoon of opening night, and here’s what’s sinking in:

Nothing is the same as in the studio.

“I don’t know how we’re going to fix this battle scene for tonight,” says a fretful Goodner, standing backstage. “Some kids went through the wrong entrances and exits; we’ve never seen these doors before. Some missed their entrances entirely. The soldiers couldn’t find their cannons….”

That’s what dress rehearsal is for - to catch the disasters before the paying customers arrive. The professional dancers with Alberta Ballet seem blithely unconcerned. They laugh and do tap-dance steps backstage. In fact, they are looser and more relaxed than the students.

Eaton, 11, playing Fritz, has a cogent observation: “I think we’re the adults and they’re the kids.”

Of course, the students are too excited to act entirely adult.

“Eeew, somebody kicked me,” says one short ballerina in the crowded dressing room. “Hey, watch the costume, bub.”

All in all, dress rehearsal is not as disastrous as Goodner feared. The stage manager and the ballet master have met with Goodner, and they’ve come up with solutions to most of their problems. Now, there’s nothing to do but wait for two hours and try it again for real.

Which brings us back to the moment on opening night when Fritz goes skittering onto the stage.

She recovers smartly and launches herself into her dance. Goodner breathes, “Didn’t bother her.”

Fritz and Clara are terrific in their scenes, and when Fritz finally comes off stage, she is full of adrenalin.

“They didn’t open the door, so I just had to knock it open,” she says, beaming.

Then comes the battle scene, and this time it comes off nearly flawlessly. The only problem is another door mixup. The Mice can’t get a door unlatched to make their entrance. Herr Drosselmeyer has to open it for them.

Backstage at intermission, everybody’s talking about it.

“I’m all, what if they never come on?” says one adolescent Soldier. “How are we supposed to kill the Mouse King?”

But everyone agrees the problem was covered well. The audience probably never noticed.

Then the second act rolls around, and the Lambs are waiting backstage to do their cuddly bit.

“You kind of want to get it over with,” says Kristy Thompson. “But that means you have to get on stage and get all nervous and mess up.”

Then comes their cue. They pounce out onto the stage, and the audience laughs warmly at their fleece-shimmying antics.

When they come off stage, Kristy is beaming.

“Thumbs up!” she says.

“Everyone was laughing as soon as we came out,” says Meredith Leva.

The Chinese dance comes off smoothly, almost as if the Chinese Dancer had been practicing with them for months.

Then comes the big Momma Ginger number. The children emerge from beneath her skirt and dance their piece more furiously than ever. As they race offstage, it takes a minute or two before they can catch their breath.

“It was fast!” said Megan Reynolds. “But you just adjust. It went well.”

And finally, opening night is over for the students, and there’s nothing left to do but watch the professionals dance the “Dance of the Flowers,” and wait for the applause to come.

Standing in the wings. Goodner finally has a well-earned moment of peace.

“This is as if a professional production of ‘Annie’ came to the Opera House, and they used all local kids,” she says.

Then she adds, pensively, “These kids don’t know how lucky they are.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Color Photos

MEMO: “The Nutcracker” continues today, 2 p.m., at the Spokane Opera House. Call 325-SEAT for tickets.