Last month, at the start of its annual “Nutcracker” tour, a small Ontario ballet company made headlines when it found itself without a set.
The five-ton truck carrying the custom-made scenery of the company, Ballet Jörgen, had vanished overnight from a suburban Toronto parking lot while the company had stopped to rehearse at its home, a basement studio in a community college.
Scrappy and resourceful, the company’s dancers are used to dealing with the unexpected — injuries, blizzards, flooded auditoriums. But now they were faced with the prospect of a nearly sold-out show in Burlington, Ontario, the next night and a bare stage.
What kind of Grinch would steal from a small, nonprofit arts group trying to spread some holiday cheer?
Within hours, the story’s tone had changed. Hearing about the robbery, ballet companies across Canada called to offer help. Thousands of miles away, the Alberta Ballet volunteered to ship its recently retired “Nutcracker” set to Ontario; dance schools along Toronto’s commuter belt opened their storage facilities; ballet fans in Burlington marshaled their carpentry skills and built a prop sleigh.
Despite 37 years as one of the few professional ballet companies in Ontario, Ballet Jörgen had only been profiled and reviewed a handful of times by major publications. Now it was on the front page of The Toronto Star, one of Canada’s largest newspapers.
Bengt Jorgen, the company’s artistic director, hadn’t expected such an outpouring. “It made me realize that we have to keep going,” he said on a December morning in Mississauga, a commuter city near Toronto that was a stop on its “Nutcracker” tour. “Everybody talks the talk, but it showed just how important the arts are. And I think we all needed to see that — I needed to.”
The episode came to an end when the police recovered the company’s truck — just 16 hours after it was reported stolen and just in time for the Burlington show. (The police said the investigation remains active.) The sets were intact, and Jorgen didn’t have to borrow from others, but the effect of the experience has been strangely positive for the company, reaffirming its commitment to its mission: taking ballet to places it wouldn’t otherwise go. In a country as vast and sparsely populated as Canada, its barnstorming has transported it to remote towns and outposts where most people have never seen a pas de deux.
The company’s tour map reads like a lesson in obscure Canadian geography. Jörgen has performed in the fjord-nestled town of Kitimat, British Columbia, near the Alaskan border; the mining town of Flin Flon, Manitoba; the fishing community of Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. Last winter, the company took “Sleeping Beauty” across the prairie province of Saskatchewan during an icy snowstorm. In La Ronge, a northern town surrounded by boreal forests, there was no proper theater. So the dancers performed in a high school gymnasium with a malfunctioning curtain and an audience on bleachers.
After the show, Ana Isabel Arauz, a dancer from Panama, went out to the foyer in her costume to meet children from the audience. They were amazed by the sight of her tutu and pointe shoes up close.
“It never feels like there’s a wall between the audience and us,” Arauz said between rehearsals in Mississauga. “We get really tired, our schedule can be crazy. But when we see the way kids respond and how inspired they are, it makes us want to perform better.”
Touring was common for ballet companies founded in the early 20th century, a model popularized by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and continuing in both Europe and North America as new troupes strove to build audiences. The National Ballet of Canada used to tour so extensively that it built compact touring versions of its large productions. (In Canada, federal funding cuts in the mid-2000s made it impossible for a large company to take elaborate story ballets on the road.)
Ballet Jörgen has found a workaround by traveling light, using recorded music instead of an orchestra, and having its 21 dancers perform in every show. To cut costs further, the company finds volunteer drivers — or sometimes a dancer gets behind the wheel, driving hundreds of miles after performing a full-length ballet. Akari Fujiwara, a principal dancer, crosses her fingers for a bathtub while on the road, a luxury she isn’t always afforded with the company’s low-cost accommodations. But extreme frugality is essential for a company that gets most of its budget from earned revenue, topped up by donors and government grants.
Like all of Ballet Jörgen’s productions, this “Nutcracker” is distinctly Canadian — its official title is “The Nutcracker: A Canadian Tradition.” Set in Northern Ontario, the ballet is replete with crowd-pleasing Canadiana like Royal Canadian Mounted Police and lumberjacks in snowshoes. It also includes local children, a further initiative for community engagement. To make this work, a company member travels to the destination before the season begins to audition local children, ages 8 to 16, and to coach teachers on the choreography. Typically, there are only a few hours to rehearse with the company when it arrives in town, and for many of these young dancers, it’s their first time onstage.
Some of the kids have extensive dance training; others, very little. So their choreography is intentionally simple — leaping like frogs or crawling like bears.
“You never know what you’re going to get,” Jorgen said. But he’s adamant that performing can make for a life-changing introduction to ballet. Hannah Mae Cruddas, a former principal with Ballet Jörgen, danced with the company as a child in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Falling in love with both the company and the form, she went on to train at Canada’s National Ballet School in Toronto with the goal of joining Ballet Jörgen as a full-time member.
While the company usually takes its “Nutcracker” all over the country, this year the tour is staying in Ontario. More than half of Ontario’s population consists of first- and second-generation Canadians, which means the show doubles as a celebration of the signs and symbols of their new home. Interestingly, most of Ballet Jörgen’s dancers are new Canadians themselves. While most trained at the company’s feeder program at George Brown College in Toronto, they grew up all over the world: Panama, Brazil, Peru, Cuba, Russia, Mexico, Japan, China, Scotland and Australia.
Jorgen was also once a new Canadian, having immigrated from Sweden in the early 1980s to attend the graduate training program at the National Ballet School. He went on to dance with the National Ballet of Canada for several seasons, before quitting to start his own company in 1987.
The original vision was to commission contemporary work, including his own, from Canadian choreographers. (The company produced early work by Crystal Pite, now an internationally renowned artist.) But the budget wouldn’t balance. Noting the dearth of classical ballet in smaller cities, Jorgen changed tack, focusing on new versions of story ballets that could appeal to audiences of all ages.
“People may look down on family productions — there are artists who don’t consider it serious work,” Jorgen said. “But for ballet, it’s natural. And having that broad appeal is what enables us to keep going every year.”
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