Alberta Ballet artists Caleb Durbin and Mariko Kondo.Nanc Price/Supplied
Francesco Ventriglia, who has been Alberta Ballet’s artistic director for the past year, knows the challenges of capturing children’s attention. On the eve of taking my kids to The Nutcracker, the classic ballet at the Jubilee Auditorium, I shared my concerns with him that they might have difficulty paying attention for the two-hour performance.
My kids, and many others, spend more time on screens than ever before – and are growing up with a different approach to storytelling. Often what they watch are episodes barely worthy of that name, changed with a swipe if the kids get bored. Even the thoughtful, well-written Bluey franchise now offers shorts three minutes long.
“It’s really important that the younger generation is still exposed to theatre, to music, and in this case, to ballet because they learn time has a different value, they learn to wait,” Mr. Ventriglia told me. “Most important, they learn that a story has a beginning and a development and an end.
“I think it’s very important for kids at a young age to have an opportunity to be able to be exposed to art, to music, to beauty.”
Mr. Ventriglia fell in love with the beauty of ballet during his early childhood in Italy. He was ill, and confined to a Genoa kids hospital for several months. But the patients there were regularly entertained by visiting dancers, and a young Mr. Ventriglia fell in love with the art form. He asked his parents for lessons as soon as he was well.
The graduate of Milan’s La Scala Theatre Ballet School travelled over the years from Italy to New Zealand as a performer and choreographer, and in December, 2023, became the artistic leader of Alberta Ballet. Mr. Ventriglia is himself sending Alberta Ballet dancers to schools and children’s hospitals for visits.
“I started dance when I was six years old. I’m still here 40 years later,” he said.
He’s also put his stamp this year on the holiday Nutcracker Alberta Ballet performances in Edmonton and Calgary – a tradition now in its 18th year – with the hope of keeping children enthralled with the tradition of ballet and storytelling.
The Nutcracker that North Americans think of as a holiday staple is 60 years old – one of the wildly successful creations of George Balanchine, the founding choreographer of the New York City Ballet, who managed to combine historic elements of his home country Russia with what the audiences of his adopted United States would want to see. Mr. Ventriglia tells every audience that The Nutcracker is the best way to start the celebrations of Christmas and the holidays.
“There is nothing wrong in tradition. And there is no cliché at all,” Mr. Ventriglia says of annual Nutcracker performances. “Traditions are beautiful. Traditions are something to remind us of our roots, who we are, where we are going and where we come from.”
The rough plot is the same but each ballet company has its own take. In Alberta, for instance, the setting for the ballet is Czarist Russia instead of the small town in Germany that is often represented. At the Calgary performance we attended, the actual ballet is augmented by a storytime before the performance, to introduce the tale of The Nutcracker for the uninitiated, and a chance for photos with decked-out ballet students and snow princesses.
The matinée, which we attended with friends earlier this month, was one of my kids’ first live-arts performance experiences. I was curious whether the show would hold their attention – and whether ballet can still be a wondrous but also calming experience in an age of screen-saturation.
It turned out they loved dressing up for a special event, and we added to it with souvenir tiaras for my daughters and their friend. They were enthralled by the opening of the ballet, which depicted a romanticized, European, late-1800s Christmas Eve, with the kids on stage featured more prominently than the grown-ups. The girls waved their arms with the music, and sometimes did the Macarena from their seats.
Their favourite sidekicks were the Snow Czarina’s scary but alluring attendant wolves. The falling snow was also a hit, and the action scenes of the first act won out over the near pure-dance second act for the youngest kids of our bunch. The 10-year-old, more than the six-year-olds, wanted to see how the story ended for Klara, and the Nutcracker.
For my older daughter especially, the beautiful strains of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s perfect music performed live, and the visual splendour of the ballet, was a hit. I was thrilled to look over and see her face as she watched the palace pages and peppermint dancers, chins up and eyes focused, with no squirming. That, in this day and age, is called a win.