The girls' studio did two Spring Ballets this year, Alice in Wonderland and The Firebird. And guess who got to be Alice? Yes. It was our Goldie. She was perfect for the part!
She is not dancing en pointe yet, but she danced so wonderfully. It was a joy to watch her. I hadn't seen Alice before and didn't know anything about it! I still don't know, actually, if this version was taken wholesale from some other production or if they cobbled it together with their own music. It was a cool mix of genres—some Shostakovich, some Prokofiev, some Danny Elfman for the lyrical dances, some other modern stuff I didn't recognize. Really fun. My first time seeing any of it was at the dress rehearsal.
First some costume pictures. Daisy was the March Hare. Or the March Bunny, as we call her.
What a leap!
Here is Goldie-Alice.
Junie and Daisy were lilacs in the flower garden, and very lovely lilacs they were.
Junie has had a sore knee for the last month or so and was wearing her knee brace for the dress rehearsal. She was able to take it off for the performance, though!
We were all admiring Goldie's hair as she was getting ready—it has gotten so long!
The backstage area is always humming with excitement before the dress rehearsal
And here she is! Her first dance is a duet with her sister (not her real sister, but her good friend Leah)
(Most of these pictures are from the dress rehearsal, but I will intersperse these two pictures of Clementine watching the show. She was entranced! She loves her dancing sisters!)
She wasn't sad here. Just focused.
Goldie follows the White Rabbit
This dance was very weird and modern, but I liked it. It was called "Falling down the rabbit hole." I suppose all the girls in black are…the hole itself?
Poor Alice! She lands with a thump at the bottom of the hole!
You really can't blame her for starting to cry. And then she begins to drown in a pool of her own tears!
But at last she reaches Wonderland!
The Caucus Race
It was so cute—there was also a "Big Alice" and a "Little Alice." So after Goldie ate a mushroom she "shrank" or "grew" by having the lights go out and the other size of Alice come out on stage. When Clementine saw the Big Alice come out, she was so confused! "Is that Goldie?" she whispered.
While Big Alice was on stage, Goldie got to be in the Flower Garden for a little while.
This was fun for Daisy and Junie because it was a pas de trois—a dance for just three of them. So it was Daisy and Junie and their friend Elle. It's always fun when they get to dance together!
Then the lilacs have a pas de quatre with the Rose Queen
Lots of duet stuff with Daisy and Junie…really fun to watch, and hard to dance!
The Mad Tea Party was really fun. Daisy's friend Andrew was a wonderful Mad Hatter!
Here's Tiny Alice! She's so cute!
This was one of my favorite parts of the show because Daisy got to tap dance! She's been taking Tap this year but before this show I hadn't ever seen her dance yet. During this scene she and the Dormouse and the other March Hare (there were two of them) quietly slip on their tap shoes and break out tapping when you least expect it! So fun! I love tap dancing.
Regular-sized Alice is back, and running away from the Trial and the Red Queen and the pack of cards chasing her!
And then she whooshes back through the rabbit hole into her own room at home! Goldie was very nervous about this part because it often hurt her knees to land on the floor when she fell back through the hole! But she carried it off like a pro.
Curtain calls!
Miss Marigold
All the Alices! It was cute to see them together. They all became good friends during this show! Anna, the more advanced Alice, was so nice to Goldie, which made me happy. I love it when the big girls are nice to the younger ones. (And they were both, I am sure, nice to Greta, the tiny Alice!)
Hooray hooray! Wild applause for Goldie! She was so good!
After all that, you would not believe that the girls did two other shows that day, both of The Firebird. (They were so exhausted and so sore afterward, especially Daisy and Junie who were en pointe the whole time, for all three shows!) I love that ballet so much. The music in it (by Stravinsky) is amazing. I have always loved the ending scene, the Apotheosis, but the rest of the music has really grown on me as well. I've never seen this ballet before—only heard the music! So I wasn't entirely sure of the story, and was happy to see it acted. It's a shorter ballet all in one act, but what there is is hard! The girl who danced the Firebird was incredible. Just amazing. And the part of the prince was danced by one of the teachers' husbands who used to be a professional dancer, so he was obviously amazing too. I felt like I was watching a professional ballet!
(Don't confuse Firebird with Rite of Spring, where the audience rioted during the premiere because the music was so weird. Ha!)
Goldie was a "minion" in this ballet, and she did NOT like her costume, nor the ugly black wig she had to wear! So no costume pictures for her! But you'll catch a little glimpse of her in a minute here.
(A few rehearsal pictures, with lovely screen saver in the background instead of the real backdrop, haha)
We all loved the head princess's dress. One of the mothers just whipped it up the week before the show! It was so beautiful!
Here is Goldie with the minions. She wasn't cut out to dance a Bad Guy part, poor thing. :)
I love the princesses when they are all lined up decoratively :)
And here, finally, is Goldie after the real performance, tired and happy and excited to see Clementine! :)
All the girls danced so beautifully and it was a pleasure watching them. I hope their sore feet, knees, ankles, and toes will recover soon!
That's a whole lot of beauty for one family! So much hard work and talent!
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