“The Nutcracker” ballet has been a global holiday classic for decades, with its music ringing of Christmas.. For the past six years, the Lake Tahoe Dance Collective has performed this magical ballet with a Tahoe twist on the weekend before Christmas. The production features a cast of local children with professional dancers in the lead roles.
This season, Incline’s Lily Bonner, a 6th grader at Lake Tahoe School, will dance the role of Clara, the young girl who dreams that her toy Nutcracker comes alive and becomes a prince. Lily has studied ballet since the age of 9 and has been dancing with the Lake Tahoe Dance Collective in Incline Village and Tahoe City for the past three years. After auditions in late September, Lily found out that she had been cast in this coveted role. “I felt super excited, and when I found out, my stomach jumped, and I wanted to start rehearsing immediately. I was so excited.”
Lily rehearses six days a week, and other student dancers from around the Tahoe Basin have had weekly rehearsals since the beginning of October. Rehearsals take place after regular ballet classes and continue through the performances on December 19-21. Other dancers from Incline Village include Silas Lefrancois as Lily’s on-stage brother, Fritz, Blake Brockman, Sofia Sacci, Rose Davison, Grace Hughes, Harry Hughes, Emilia Cruz, Aspen Conway, Allison and Charlotte Meyer, Miya Lefrancois, and Calixta Cordoba Sosa.
New York City Ballet’s Indiana Woodward will travel to Tahoe for the third year to dance the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Boston Ballet’s Lawrence Rines Munro will dance as her Cavalier.
In 2023 and 2024, a generous grant from the Tahoe Community Foundation, formerly known as Parasol, funded delightful new costumes and updates to the sets and technical equipment which greatly elevated the presentation. The sets were designed to evoke the historic Tahoe Tavern in the 1920s and the Land of the Sweets, where Hot Chocolate, Marzipan, and Christmas Cookies dance across the stage.
Christin Hanna, Founder and Executive and Artistic Director of the Lake Tahoe Dance Collective, trains and rehearses the 51 young dancers in the cast, many of whom have been dancing in her Tahoe City and Incline studios for years. Part of the tradition of this ballet is that dancers can measure their success in both artistry and technique as they grow up dancing new and more challenging roles. This year, Romi Broglio and Miriam Kallmes, high school students and senior members of the LTDC Company are dancing the soloist roles of Snow Queen and Dew Drop. In the Tahoe production’s 2019 premiere, both girls began performing the roles of little mice. Hanna says, “When I look at our youngest ones in their party scene dresses, I know that in a blink of an eye, they’ll be teenagers in lead roles. It’s the perfect example of hard work and discipline paying off.”
Performances take place in the theater at North Tahoe High School on Friday, December 19th at 7pm and Saturday and Sunday, December 20th and 21st at 3pm. Tickets start at $30, with a limited number of “Pay What You Can” tickets available, at www.laketahoedancecollective.org
