Winter means one very important thing to dancers: Nutcracker season.

Like most other dancers, I’ve spent the past month learning choreography and rehearsing for my studio’s annual holiday show.  We don’t put on a full version of the holiday classic The Nutcracker, but we do choose a few of its more well-known dances to perform.  After our mini-Nutcracker, we have the actual holiday recital consisting of numbers of all sorts of dance styles set to holiday music.  A studio tradition is to end the show with a jazz dance set to “All I Want for Christmas” by Mariah Carey.  Older and more advanced dancers make up most of the performers in the group, but the dance ends with everyone in the studio coming out on the stage and dancing around like maniacs to the rest of the song.  We all shout “Happy Holidays!” and the curtains close, and the audience loves it.  I’ve been in that “All I Want for Christmas” dance since our studio began.  You might think that the crowd and the dancers get bored of seeing the same dance year after year.  Nope.  We decide (since we’re crazy) to change the choreography each year, making it a different dance, just to the same song.

I’m not super overly excited for the show, but I think it will be fun.  Even if something goes wrong, there isn’t a whole lot of pressure on us to make it perfect; people are just there to enjoy the holiday music and entertainment.  The real pressure comes in the spring: end-of-the-year-show season.

fradellafra from Pixabay

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