Reply to TWSB Nutcracker 2023!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I can imagine how it would feel to be assigned a soldier and then end up a page. Or be a page three years in a row! Being part of the Nutcracker is exciting, but at a certain point... Our DD stopped dancing at WSB a few years ago because of their inflexible schedule for older girls. I can say in retrospect that all of this seems like such a big deal in the moment but isn't. On the other hand, there should be respect for the girls involved. Three years as a page is just wrong. And switching someone from soldier to page is, for a young girl, a pretty big blow. These roles do have varying levels of desirability, and young girls will take something like this hard. There should be more respect for the girls or a clear warning about what could happen so families don't sign up for a possible humiliation of this order without being aware of what could happen.[/quote]

If my kid were assigned as a page for the third year in a row and didn't want to do it, I would 100% pull them out. I don't give a crap what I signed earlier. It's so totally disrespectful to the girls. This is especially true because one kid who I knew who got stuck in that role for two years was more or less told that it's because they were an excellent babysitter for the younger kids. It's especially crappy to get the worst role because you're a nice kid. 3 years in a row? No way.[/quote]

This is such a poor attitude. [b]This is a company production, not a school production.[/b] The casting is about filling the needs of the production, and not necessarily about showcasing each student. This is going to vary on the number of kids who show up to the audition at each level.[/quote]
It's a bit more nuanced than that--the Company uses ONLY students from the School, and works closely with the school for auditions. It is in the long-term best interest of the Company to ensure that students continue to audition. If the TWB reputation for the Nutcracker is that the girls from SE end up as flower pages year after year--and that the girls from NW end up as clowns and party girls, then very few girls from SE will audition. [/quote]

This. I have no doubt that ballet in general is somewhat racist and the girls of color in NW get screwed too. But this year it is incredibly apparent that the whole SE program was basically treated as expendable. Almost uniformly the limited number of kids not cast at the younger levels were from SE, the SE kids are disproportionately the pages  and there are virtually zero SE kids in the desirable roles. On top of that, there are the 6 SE “soldiers” who found out they were demoted to pages. For a lot of these roles, there is no question that the roles require largely overlapping skills and selection doesn’t meaningfully effect the show at all. It may, on the other hand, lead to a mass exodus from SE. I think they’ve truly made a mistake here.[/quote]

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