Two dancers from the Footworks Dance Academy will be performing in the Alberta Ballet production of The Nutcracker, which will be performed at the Northern Jubilee Auditorium in Edmonton from Dec. 6-9.
Lunay Wepner is a first-time performer in the production, appearing as one of the Cossack rats who guard the Rat King.
Meanwhile, this will be the second appearance in The Nutcracker for Yasmeen Assaf, who will be playing one of the mice.
As you may know, The Nutcracker is the story of Clara, a young girl who is transported into a mystical world while attending a party on Christmas Eve. There, she allies with a living Nutcracker soldier, who resembles a toy she was given by her godfather as a Christmas gift.
Alberta Ballet, which is Canada’s second largest professional ballet company, has enlisted the help of about 100 amateur youth dancers, including Lunay.
Auditions began in late September at the Ruth Carse Centre in Edmonton, where Lunay and her fellow Footworks student Yasmeen Assaf joined hundreds of others from all over northern Alberta.
This was Lunay’s second attempt at joining the cast, as she had auditioned for the ballet two years ago. At that time, however, she said she let her nerves get the best of her and subsequently wasn’t chosen for the production.
But Lunay refused to give up so easily. “I wanted to try it again just so I could have another experience. Plus,this time, I was determined not to let my nerves get in the way,” she said.
Before the audition, they were divided by choreographers into what parts they are best suited for. This is because certain characters in the ballet need to be between a certain size range.
“Originally I was in a group with palace pages, but then I was moved to one of the [rat] soldiers group,” Lunay said.
“They asked us to do certain steps and movements, a lot of them were based on Russian dances, with a lot of turning. They were also big on character.”
Because there were so many dancers and different roles to audition for, the entire process took about four hours.
“I was pretty nervous going into it, but I handled it better than my first time I think the most nerve-wracking part is the waiting,” Wepner said, adding there was a considerable time from when her group auditioned to when the choreographers narrowed down the field before making the final selections.
She added now that the audition process is over, she feels a lot more at ease so she is able to concentrate at learning the choreography during weekly two-hour training sessions.
Although you might have thought Yasmeen’s appearance in last year’s Nutcracker as a mouse would have made her less nervous, the 10-year old said it might have had the opposite effect.
Yasmeen has been dancing at Footworks Dance Academy since she was four, taking classes in jazz, hip hop, acrobatics, performance, but her favourite style or type of dance is ballet.
That is one of the reasons why she decided to audition for The Nutcracker.
“I want to become better at ballet and last year I had such a good experience, I thought I would try it again,” she said, adding despite her positive experience last year she was still quite nervous.
Yasmeen’s audition was relatively short, consisting only of one 30-minute session.Her mother Reem noted it actually took longer for them to register and be assigned a number and group than the audition itself.
One of the reasons Assaf’s audition was shorter than many of the other groups is because there were fewer children auditioning for the mouse roles. In her group, there were only about a dozen other dancers.
Originally she thought that since she was one year older and a little bit taller than last year that she would be auditioning for another part, but as it turned out, she wasn’t quite tall enough to audition for any of the other parts.
“We had to pretend to be mice, so we had to crawl on our knees and do a lot of scratching,” Assaf said.
Since the audition, Assaf and her mother have been making weekly trips to Edmonton for rehearsal sessions, which for the mice typically last about 45 minutes.
One of the things Assaf is looking forward to most is the dress-rehearsal, where the dancers will get to work with all the other performers, including the professional dancers.
When asked how it will feel to go on stage for the actual performance, Assaf said she believes she will be more excited than anything else.
“I’m not actually on stage for that long, maybe a couple of minutes and you can’t actually see the audience,” she said, adding that because she hasn’t seen the entire performance she doesn’t know the full story beyond it taking place at a Christmas party.
However, the one thing Assaf is sure of is that the rest of the cast will put on a wonderful performance and she hopes a number of people from Barrhead will get a chance to see it.
