They said to me that that is actually their story of how they met. What was so crazy is, like, in the show, the mom and dad sort of meet on the dance floor and fall in love instantly. There’s this mom and dad relationship in the show and it had to be tWitch ( Stephen Boss) and Allison, (who were married in real life) to be the anchor of the show. Weber: We started like thinking about who would be the ideal cast for this. Stephen “tWitch” Boss in The Hip Hop Nutcracker/Disney/Ser BaffoīTL: How did you assemble your cast of dancers? It seems as though many of them come from So You Think You Can Dance. So we put this pitch together, took it out, and Disney came on board. I always had this idea that The Hip Hop Nutcracker could be more than a stage show, and that it would be amazing to actually be able to create the locations where the show takes place.
Classic hip hop dance moves tv#
I partnered with Done + Dusted and Raj Kapoor and we took it out as a TV project. It’s on tour right now, and it’s been on tour since 2015. The Hip Hop Nutcracker was a live show that I created. Let’s do it!’īTL: So how did you adapt the stage show The Hip Hop Nutcracker for Disney+? The Nutcracker is a big piece, but I love a good challenge. The head of that theater said, ‘I don’t know about Vivaldi, but what about The Nutcracker?’Īnd then my mind just like exploded because I ran a very small company that only had six dancers. I was experimenting with a lot of different things and I was doing this piece to Vivaldi‘s Four Seasons, and I pitched it at a theater that was very, very big, called The United Palace in Washington Heights here in New York. There are a million versions of Shakespeare, but there aren’t a million versions of the classic text of dance, I thought those two things kind of came together. Weber: I got really excited about working with hip-hop and classical music, and at the same time, I was sort of asking why, like, in theater, people are always reimagining the classic text, specifically Shakespeare. But with classical music, it’s so many waves with different tempos and different instrumentations and different time signatures and all these things.īTL: How did you realize that idea with The Hip Hop Nutcracker? You know, hip-hop music is so predictable because it’s a repetitive beat and songs have a specific type of structure. Jennifer Weber: I live in New York and I ran an all-female hip-hop dance company for many years, and we started experimenting with what would happen when you mixed hip-hop with classical music - mostly in an attempt to kind of, like, push hip-hop in a different direction. How did this mash-up of classic ballet and hip-hop come about? Jennifer Weber image via Maria Baranovaīelow the Line: Take me back to the beginning. In fact, both of them make appearances in The Hip Hop Nutcracker, along with a bevy of alums from Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance. She knows both worlds well, as she has worked with NYC Ballet principal dancer Tiler Peck, and considers Mikhail Baryshnikov a friend. Filled with boundless (and infectious) energy and excitement, Weber discussed her passion for infusing classic ballet with hip-hop language to reach a new, more diverse audience. Weber also recently added her signature hip-hop moves to another classic, Romeo & Juliet, which she re-imagined in the Broadway show & Juliet.īelow the Line spoke with Jennifer Weber via Zoom video from her home in New York. Weber also served as Choreographer of The Hip Hop Nutcracker, which made its debut as a live theatrical production featuring rap legend Kurtis Blow and has been touring across the U.S. Jennifer Weber ( Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 2), an Emmy Award-winning choreographer based in New York City and Los Angeles, envisioned a much more modern version of this timeless tale, so she created The Hip Hop Nutcracker, which is currently streaming on Disney+. It’s a two-act story told entirely through dance, featuring a cast of characters including toy soldiers, mischievous mice, and dancing snowflakes, delighting an audience of children of all ages. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, it was originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov with a score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.Ĭelebrating 130 years, the most famous holiday rendition features the New York City Ballet performing George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker. Based on Alexandre Dumas‘ adaptation of E.T.A. 6, 1892, by order of Czar Alexander III in St. The classic ballet, which is over three centuries old, premiered on Dec.
Around this time of year, young ballerinas are lacing up their pointe shoes, poised and prepared to dance The Nutcracker.
0 kommentar(er)
