SEASON OF THE ARTS
DANCE
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King Mouse and FADC instructor Dominique Binns perform in the battle scene in the 2016 FADC production.
sonalities of the presenters, and they are plentiful on the
Treasure Coast.
BALLET VERO BEACH
When you simply cannot Àt one more vision of dancing
sugar plums into your head, picture instead manatees
and dolphins twirling and pliéing in Ballet Vero Beach’s
innovative The Nutcracker on the Indian River.
The story behind the ballet remains the same in Ballet
Vero Beach’s version — sort of. Adam Schnell, artistic
director and CEO of the region’s only professional ballet
company, thinks outside the jack-in-the-box when it
comes to The Nutcracker.
“I am pretty sure there has never been a version where
the second act is set in Florida,” he said. “Our production
uses the Tchaikovsky score and the classical ballet idiom
to tell a unique version of the classic tale. Nutcracker on
the Indian River moves the action of the story to 1919, the
year Vero Beach was chartered. Rather than a candy palace,
our heroine journeys from New York to Florida and
is entertained by all manner of local flora and fauna.µ
While the story, based on +oͿmann·s longago fairy
tale, has been tweaked and modiÀed through the two
centuries since it was written, it wasn’t always successfully
presented.
“The original ballet from Russia borrows very loosely
from that source material and was a total flop on its premiere,”
Schnell said.
Schnell believes The Nutcracker’s staging is open to
interpretation.
“There is no one librettist for what I would call either >>
Ballet Vero Beach’s professional
dancers rehearse the waltz of the
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Nutcracker on the Indian River.