Pocatello dance company to stage special Christmas ballet
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POCATELLO — The students of Miss Tiffin’s Ballet and Barre in Pocatello are prepping a show that’s sure to help put you in the Christmas mood.
The studio will present “Scrooge’s Christmas: A Theatrical Ballet” on Friday, Nov. 18, and Saturday, Nov. 19 at 7 p.m. at Idaho State University’s Frazier Hall. Click here for tickets.
The ballet is an adaptation of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” that focuses on the key moments of that story and transforms them into beautiful dance sequences.
“When we opened the studio (about five years ago), we wanted to have a holiday production for the students to work towards,” Tiffin Bennett, the owner of Miss Tiffin’s Ballet and Barre, told EastIdahoNews.com. “We wanted to open it to the community, so we wanted a story that could expand and that we could adjust to fit anyone and everyone who wanted to be in the show.”
They settled on “A Christmas Carol” as it lent itself to those parameters and was a good fit for the kind of choreography Bennett wanted to employ. Bennett and her team adapted the story into a ballet that captures the spirit of the original while presenting it in a unique way.
“‘Scrooge’s Christmas’ has narration throughout,” Bennett said. “All of the text is taken directly from ‘A Christmas Carol,’ so these are all Dickens’ words. We hit the highlights and put it together such that we can fit in all abilities and ages dancers.”
Bennett said adapting a story that’s as well-known and beloved as “A Christmas Carol” presents some major challenges.
“I would say the main challenge is that people are familiar with it,” she said. “They have a picture in their minds of how they think this character or that character should look. Luckily for us, because we’re coming at it from such a unique angle, we have a little more breathing room to share our adaptation. And because we use narration throughout to take our audience through the story and describe the transformation that’s happening with Scrooge, that works to our benefit.”
The production includes cast members as young as six years old to mature adults. Bennett said that calls for handling the rehearsals in groups.
“We divide and conquer,” she said. “We’ve been rehearsing since September. We have the kids come for short periods, and we section. For example, we have our phantoms section, and we have our wanton ignorants section, and we have just the dancers in those sections rehearse. Then, for the past few weeks, we have combined all of our sections and worked on the transitions (between different scenes).”
Bennett hopes to bring all the different elements of the story and performances together into a ballet that will have something for everyone, even those who aren’t dancing aficionados.
“If you think of a traditional ballet, often those are kind of flat characters and flat stories,” she said. “But ours is very three-dimensional. We have dancers coming in and out of the audience. We’ve added our own humorous touches we’ve found within the story. And because it’s told through dance with some narration on top of it, it just gives a different perspective.”
You can see Miss Tiffin’s Ballet and Barre’s production of “Scrooge’s Christmas: A Theatrical Ballet” Friday, Nov. 18, and Saturday, Nov. 19, at 7 p.m. at Frazier Hall on the Idaho State University campus in Pocatello. Click here for tickets.
A portion of the proceeds from ticket sales will be donated to a scholarship fund set up by Eastern Idaho Down Syndrome Family Connect.
