Transcending The Traditional

By Cathy Roe 

Make the season bright -- and keep your students on their toes -- with a trio of holiday extravaganzas.

If your students are like mine, an air of excitement prevails in the studio when a show is in the works. The temptation to play hooky from technique classes diminishes, and everyone is eager to show up and be seen. Especially with teens, I find that a performance is the perfect “carrot on a stick” to keep boyfriends and the mall at bay.

A once-a-year recital isn’t enough for my students, so I started integrating a holiday show into the curriculum years ago. But while planning a performance may be the best way to keep students motivated, it is an awful lot of work for us teachers. So I have come up with a formula. I have developed three different holiday shows, which I alternate from year to year. And each show includes everyone in the studio.

The first show I created is my Nutcracker All Jazz’d Up. Its jazzy style sets it apart from all the other Nuts in town during the season. I had the Tchaikovsky score re-orchestrated by a rock band to fit the show’s theme as a techno-jazz-pop-psychedelic journey. Every note of the original score is intact, but the use of synthesizers and percussion takes it to the entertainment apex. The production was a huge undertaking and expense, but it will last for generations.

The second holiday extravaganza is called Making Spirits Bright. It can encompass Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and any tradition of joy and celebration. The dancers perform to a variety of holiday songs—everything from Mariah Carey’s “Joy to the World” to a flamenco version of “Feliz Navidad”—played one after the other, with no blackouts. Other favorite holiday music includes songs by the Acappella Angels and from Rockapella’s Christmas, Motown Christmas, and CDs I’ve found in the dollar bin. The ethnic flair of the music and costumes adds variety, and the show is a wonderful way to show off your students in many different styles—jazz, funk, modern, lyrical, hip-hop, Latin, and even vaudeville.

The third show is called Ebenezer Scrooge: Jazzed Up Like the Dickens. It’s based on the Charles Dickens story, of course, but I wrote a script that is campy, zany, and full of comedy. An actor plays the reformed Scrooge and narrates the story between the dances. The story lends itself to tons of ideas. For instance, I open the show with a money/greed dance set to a Blue Whales rendition of “Give Me Money,” but there are many other options, like “Money (That’s What I Want)” from the soundtrack of The Wedding Singer, or the same song done by The Beatles.

Other scenes include the one when Ebenezer sees his true love, Belle. In this show, Belle dances a lyrical solo through a veil to “Here, There, and Everywhere,” sung by a female vocalist. And the optimistic Bob Cratchit is bumped and teased by Broadway-style hat-and-caners to the song “All for the Best” from Godspell.

 I start planning my holiday show in June, just as I am sweeping the last bobby pins off the stage from the spring recital. It takes time to find all the music, but that’s really the fun part, too. A great place to hunt down music is on the Internet. Real Rhapsody is a site you can join and download songs for less than a dollar. If you have an iPod, you already know about the vast selections you can find on iTunes.

By September registration, I have all the music picked out and am ready to start setting the choreography. Now here is the trick to the formula: In addition to videotaping every show, you also tape yourself (just a home camera will do) teaching all the routines and choreography. Then in the future, your advanced students can learn the choreography from the teaching segment of the video, and you can divide the workload between yourself and your teaching assistants. This leaves you free to interject new pieces of choreography into the show to keep it fresh from year to year. 

 Photo captions and credits (top to bottom):

Poster for Cathy Roe's Making Spirits Bright. Photo by Robert Stivers.

Belle and Young Scrooge duet in Ebenezer Scrooge: Jazzed Up Like the Dickens. Photo by Rupama.