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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

‘Nutcracker’ 2.0

Alberta Ballet serves up new sets, costumes for 2008 production

With new sets and new costumes, Alberta Ballet returns to Spokane ready to stage a new “Nutcracker,” with the Spokane Symphony, starting Friday.   Courtesy of Alberta Ballet (Courtesy of Alberta Ballet / The Spokesman-Review)
By Travis Rivers  I  Correspondent

The Spokane Symphony has had a regular December dance date for the past two decades.

Alberta Ballet and the symphony will again perform Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” at the INB Performing Arts Center starting Friday, as they have for the past 17 consecutive years (and 21 overall).

But this year, the dance company will bring an all-new “Nutcracker” to town.

“We’ve been coming to Spokane with our ‘Nutcracker’ for a long time now,” said Edmund Stripe, Alberta Ballet’s ballet master and the choreographer for the new production.

“The sets and costumes of our old production had been used for 14 years, and the choreography by Mikko Nissinen originated in 2000. So it was time for a completely new production.”

Alberta’s artistic director, Jean Grand-Maitre, was impressed with Stripe’s choreography for the company’s 2006 “Alice in Wonderland.” He asked Stripe to create new “Nutcracker” choreography, and invited Emmy Award-winning Zack Brown to design new costumes and sets.

“Everything about it is new, except, happily, Tchaikovsky’s music,” Stripe said in a telephone interview following the first full dress rehearsal in Calgary.

“This is the first ‘Nutcracker’ I have choreographed,” said the London-born dancer, who has been Alberta Ballet’s ballet master for six and a half years. “When you come in with a slightly new take on a classic beloved by so many people, it is a bit daunting.

“You want to keep people entertained and enchanted, but at the same time there has to be new elements to it.”

Stripe had no desire to make jolting changes, “but I did want to give a bit more ‘wow’ to the production. Zack Brown and I decided to set our production in imperial Russia, so that give something of a change right there in the nature of the dancing.”

As a student at London’s Royal Ballet School, Stripe danced his first “Nutcracker” in 1972 as a soldier in Rudolf Nureyev’s choreography for the Royal Ballet.

“It was radically different. That was the production that stayed with me for a long time,” Stripe said. “And I borrowed a couple of things from Nureyev.

“Ours is still very much classical ballet with the girls on their pointes and with the glamor and tutus you associate with ballet,” he said. “And the story is still that of Klara, a young girl who is given a nutcracker doll for Christmas, it gets broken, and she falls asleep and has this fantastic dream.”

But Stripe “tweaked the story a bit” – just a little in the direction of Nureyev, perhaps – to give a more prominent roles to characters who have had very little to do in more traditional “Nutcracker” productions.

“For instance, Drosselmeyer, Klara’s godfather and giver of the nutcracker doll, is more of an instigator of how the story develops at the end of Act I and during Act II,” Stripe said.

The new production came at the cost of $1.5 million Canadian. More than 60 people across Canada and the U.S. worked to produce the sets and 150 new costumes, some of which took up to five months to construct.

It opened in Victoria, B.C., on Saturday and will play here this weekend before returning to the company’s hometowns of Edmonton and Calgary.

The four Spokane performances will feature Yukichi Hattori as the Nutcracker Prince; Nadezhda Vostrikov as Klara; Anthony Pina as her brother, Nikolai; Jonathan Ollivier as Klara’s godfather, Drosselmeyer; and Jung-Min Hong as the Sugar Plum Fairy.

In addition to the 26 dancers from Alberta Ballet, 56 young dancers from 11 Spokane-area dance schools in the Spokane region will participate. The student dancers are working with Peggy Tan and Dodie Askegard of Ballet Arts Academy.

Peter Dala, Alberta Ballet’s music director, will conduct the symphony.

“Most ballet productions, including ‘Nutcracker,’ are designed for a a specific theater, but this one was designed to tour,” Stripe said.

Sets for the new production include 100 casters which enable parts of the scenery to move silently around the stage, and use 3,000 feet of steel cables.

The walls of the Sugar Plum Fairy’s palace in Act II are studded with 1,000 wooden rosettes and 3,000 jewels which had to be glued on by hand.

Four trucks brought sets and costumes to Spokane on Tuesday, when the production began setting up. The dancers arrive today for rehearsals.

The original production for the 1892 premiere at the Maryinsky Theater in St. Peterburg was a flop. One critic dismissed the ballet as “showing no creativity whatsoever.”

History’s verdict has been different. Now nearly every company that does classical ballet (and some that don’t) performs “Nutcracker” each year. Dozens of choreographers have tried their hand at infusing it with their own creativity.

“At our first full dress rehearsal, there were gasps and audible intakes of breath from the audience at just the right places,” Stripe said, adding: “I’d like the think this production would make Tchaikovsky very, very, happy.”