Friday, December 11, 2020
UNCSA Students Create a Collaborative "Nutcracker" Movie for the Pandemic Era
Pointe: Earlier this year, anticipating the ongoing repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic, University of North Carolina School of the Arts' interim dean of dance, Jared Redick, started looking ahead to their annual Nutcracker performances. In May, he and the deans of UNCSA's Film, Music, and Design and Production schools started brainstorming on how to maintain some semblance of the holiday tradition safely, while also being instructive for their students and beneficial to the community.
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I’m so happy i found this article because I was just reading last week about the devastation over the NutCracker being cancelled this year and this completely brought some light to that subject. I think, although it’s not the “real thing”, a rendition is always fun to see and the NutCracker will be dearly missed by everyone, so anyone who sees this version will have something to watch for this year instead. With the pandemic a lot things that we never thought we have to come to an end, did, or at least for now they did. But, this is a kind of situation where there really is not much you can do to fix the problem other than wait and be patient. With theatre especially is difficult to just sit in one spot and be patient, especially for a craft with immediate progression, not seeing results and improvements is not really an option because that set up an obstacle for the production which means it can no longer move forward.
Before even starting the article, I noticed that the dancer was wearing a mask to match her tutu and I absolutely love that. It's subtle enough that it looks plain but if you zoom in you can see that it's more detailed than a simple plain pink mask. And this is also carried out for the other characters, with the toy soldier being my favorite out of the ones shown in the images. It was interesting to read about the process of truncating the piece as well as balancing rehearsals, and how those involved saw the experience akin to a professional one, especially when working on film as a dancer. It was also good to read that UNCSA is planning to create more "dance on film" and will continue to educate their students on the practices, as I think a lot of schools are just crossing their fingers and hoping they don't have to start that, instead hoping to stick to traditional staged theater.
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