Nutcracker 2007
Conejo Civic Ballet Company's Nutcracker 2007 production was performed Sunday, December 2, 2007 at 2:30pm in the Kavli Theatre, Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza to an enthusiastic audience. Peter Tchaikovsky's score for Nutcracker is one of the most beloved in ballet. This production was choreographed by Brett Weidlich and this year he included two dancers for the role of Clara; a young Clara through most of Act 1 and a more advanced dancer performing the role of Clara after the Nutcracker turns into a handsome prince. Of course there are always changes from the previous year performance. Dancers advance in their training and are capable of more difficult choreography and new dancers are added. The choreography changes to take advantage of these changes.
Many people contributed to make this performance special. Besides our choreographer, Brett Weidlich, who also performed in the role of Drosselmeyer, and the dancers of CCBC, special thanks goes to our artist director, Eva Pokorny, and Helena Pokorny, our talented Ballet Mistress and soon-to-be mother. A special thanks to several of our instructors who participated: Anzhela Martynova as Clara's Mother and Mother Ginger, Robert Loftin as the Mouse King, a parent and in Russian, and Linda Lewis, Lauren Smith and Melisa Sutherland as parents. The talented teaching staff of Ballet Arts was essential to ensuring that the dancers were well prepared for this performance. A special thanks to Marc and Cindy Borbas for acting as host family to Raymond and Ronald Tilton, making it possible for these dancers to participate in this production of Nutcracker. Lastly, thanks goes to Robin Twarowski, Executive Director of CCBC, who garnered resources, called the show, and had a hand in every aspect of the production.
A list of the program credits is extensive and highlights the number of people that worked on props, costumes, staging and rehearsals, so essential to creating a performance that comes alive. A full list of credits can be found on the electronic copy of the Program for the show.
We have tried to capture some measure of the excitement of this performance in the Storybook slideshow playing above, using photos from the performance. No amount of multi-media material can take the place of actually experiencing a live performance such as this one, but for those who were in the audience, I hope the photos will remind you of that exciting performance. And for those that did not attend, we hope to give a small glimpse of this magical ballet and the dedicated and talented members of CCBC who create that magic.
The photos were taken for CCBC by Harry Mathias and selection and cropping were done by CCBC so all credit goes to the former and complaints to the latter.
Video Clips
We have an assortment of video clips providing a sample of the entire Nutcracker 2007 performance. The selection of clips was somewhat arbitrary because there was so much good dancing to choose from. If you want to see more than is available in these clips then order the DVD and you will also have the advantage of higher resolution. The clips vary in size from over 1 Mbyte to under 4 Mbytes so if you have a slow dial-up internet connection you may wish to start with the picture slideshow above.
The video clips are displayed in a "flash" multimedia embedded viewer so you have to have "flash" installed on your computer. It is free and plays on almost all computers. The controls below the video image are play/pause on the left, the progress bar in the middle, the full screen control on the right of the progress bar, and the volume control on the right. Below the controls is the playlist with the scroll bar to the right. Run the scrollbar up or down and when you find the selection you want click on the title with your mouse. The title should play. On the far right of the title in the playlist is a control to let you download the clip if you wish.