Tara Butler on New Group of Seven Nutcracker

The Nutcracker and Klara vs King Bat, Ballet Jörgen vs The Weather

Dec 30, 2008

From Chipmunks to Trilliums, The G7 Nutcracker is entirely different. Though Tchaikovsky's song remains the same, Canada's Climate does not.

Despite the fact this Nutcracker is set in the Canadian wilds, it essentially has the same themes.

Tara Butler: “It does follow the same dreamscape story. It’s just that there is a lot more influence of Canadiana, the history of all of that... I don’t want to give too much away. But we recently performed the ballet in North Bay, which is very close to where it is loosely based and the response was overwhelming. It was as though this Nutcracker happened in the back yard of most of these people’s homes.”

Tara Butler: “Yes, and in our second act, there are a lot of Canadian creatures, so we have raccoons and we have squirrels, and loons...”

Tara Butler: “Yes, the bears are adorable… far cry from the Pooh bears, they are the scary “going out camping” bears. Bengt (Jörgen) was influenced by this because he does a lot of camping over the summer, which I do as well . There is a real connection there with wildlife, so if you go to Algonquin and really go camping and there is a real respect there so it’s nice that he as given them a place."

Ballet Jörgen has recently acquired a new not-so-silent ensemble member: the weather! How has this affected your tour?

Tara Butler: “It has been tremendous. The second day of our tour out East, two of our mini ans, me driving one and Bengt driving the other, got stuck on Highway 104 for eight hours. We each had half a tank of gas. You spend a couple of hours, and you think okay… but we had no idea there was a snow storm coming. They closed the highway and we were all on it. Halfway through the eight hours, I said ‘Look you guys, bundle up because I have to turn the van off or we are going to run out of gas.’

We would turn the van off for one hour-and-a-half and then turn it back on again to heat up. It was a bit of a nightmare, so we eventually got off the highway and coasted into a gas station and the same thing happened with Bengt’s van. We travel with three minivans. One of the minivans was travelling a little behind us and they were able to get off the highway before it closed down, but we got stuck on it and that was interesting. The roads were awful on that tour.

We have made every show and we have gotten there in time to do the spacing properly and it being a new show we are always desperate for any rehearsal we can get but somehow, I don’t know how, we ended up getting to all the places that we needed to get on time in order to do the show. It was a little bit stressful. We got from that one week tour and we all said it felt like we had been gone for a month. The weather has been insane.”

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