SANDRA WOODALL
This costume rendering for guests at the opening Christmas Eve party is the work of designer Sandra Woodall, who's done costumes and scenery for ballet companies worldwide. For Atlanta Ballet, she last designed costumes for Camino Real.
which is soon broken. A young girl named Marie checks on it in the middle of the night and discovers it has come to life. The nutcracker battles a mouse king, then turns into a prince who carries Marie off to a fantasy kingdom inhabited by dolls. Hoffmann’s tale contained bleak, even scary elements. As a leader in the German Romantic movement, he was accustomed to writing fantasy and Gothic horror, with tales full of inanimate objects coming to life. In 1844, French writer Alexandre Dumas cast away much of the darkness in Hoffmann's story. An all-new 1892 Nutcracker in St. Petersburg, Russia, paired the lighter Dumas telling with the familiar Tchaikovsky score. The ballet was not an immediate hit, finding success gradually and chiefly after 1954, when George Balanchine created a version for New York City Ballet. Atlanta audiences have seen that version, and until now, the one choreographed by former artistic director John McFall. Possokhov’s ballet is unlike either. “Yuri is truly a child in big-person pants,” Nedvigin says. “He has such a great sense of creativeness inside him. The dancers can prove my words. He truly becomes a child and 14
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