This December, Haldane’s dancers at Ballet Arts Studio (BAS) in Beacon, N.Y., tackled a yearly challenge: “The Nutcracker.” On December 13, 2025, eight Haldane High School students and many Haldane Elementary and Middle School students performed in Ballet Arts Studio’s production of “The Nutcracker.” In the past, this performance was in collaboration with Ballet Rockland, another local dance studio, but for the 2025 performance, Katie Bissinger, the creative director of BAS, decided to produce the ballet independently for the first time. The dancers had many opinions on this; senior Louisa Shimming stated that she “was a little bit disappointed, because we’re friends with some of the dancers [at Ballet Rockland], they’re super nice, and it was fun to work together.” Others shared this view and were curious about how BAS would be able to perform the ballet alone.
On the other hand, dancers were excited because new roles opened up to them, especially in Act Two. Junior Clara Gelber explained, ‘with only BAS dancers in our Nutcracker, we gained three more dances… Those being ‘Arabian Coffee,’ ‘Chinese Tea,’ and ‘Marzipan.’” In previous years, advanced dancers played many of the en-pointe roles in “The Nutcracker,” and very young dancers played the children in the “party scene”, but there weren’t many roles for middle-school-aged dancers who were new to pointe. But this year, many of the new dances were opened up to those dancers, like “Arabian” and “Tea.” This way, the workload on the older dancers didn’t increase intensely, even though the number of roles increased. Sophomore Leo O’Neil commented that this year, “younger and up-and-coming students who have potential to be in the Duchess Dance Company got to participate in Act Two as well.”
With more roles came more hours of work put into making the show the best it could be. Chloe Hasler, a sophomore, went into detail about the changed rehearsal schedule. She said, “Last year, we only had four dances to rehearse in our three-hour rehearsal time, but this year, we had seven to eight dances to rehearse in that time.” Because of this, most dancers had to come in for rehearsal on Sunday mornings as well as Saturdays.
After the show weekend, some of the dancers shared their reflections regarding successes and failures. Gelber recounted that “there’s so much that went on to make the production. Months of long rehearsals and so much happening backstage with quick changing, presetting, and so much more. The whole cast is a team, and we help and support each other through a production.” Schimming shared a similar opinion, saying, “It’s difficult to put together the show when you only rehearse once or twice per week. But I think that this year’s ‘Nutcracker’ was our best yet. Even though it was more work to put it together alone, all of the dances were thoroughly rehearsed, the shows were really successful, and it was more stylistically cohesive because it was all our choreography.” All of the dancers agree that this production was one of the best they’ve put on so far and encourage people to go see next year’s performance.
