The nutcracker Ballet experience - sold out for 2024

 Our school show for 2024 is SOLD OUT. Contact us now to reserve your spot for the 2025 school show. 

 Join our young heroine, Clara, through a magical journey where she battles an evil rat king, travels through the snowy forest, and encounters new friends of all kinds in the land of sweets. Don’t miss this Christmas classic, featuring professional dancers from around the world.

Lancaster Mennonite High Fine Arts Center

2176 Lincoln Highway East

Lancaster PA 17602

 The Nutcracker Experience is designed for students in grades 2 through 8. Student and Adult tickets are $10, with one free adult for each 15 tickets that are purchased. Please email Kelly at vyballet@gmail.com to reserve your tickets.

 The Nutcracker Ballet Experience will provide a full circle learning opportunity that would include lesson plans to introduce the art of ballet through the story of the Nutcracker while providing musical interactions with Tchaivkovsky’s famous composition, and finish with a field trip to see a special performance of the Nutcracker that is designed specifically for children by the VY International Ballet Academy in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. 

  The Nutcracker Ballet Experience will expose your students to professional ballet dancers from all over the world, as well as young student dancers from Lancaster County. At the performance, your students will have the opportunity to meet the dancers and ask questions, and most importantly of all, your students will connect with artists and performers that are from culturally diverse backgrounds. Our hope is that this experience will not only provide your students with a rare and enjoyable performance, but that it will provide them with first hand knowledge of beauty created by a team of diverse people, and as a result, open their minds and hearts to the possibility of also contributing to a team in their own unique way to make the world a better, and more beautiful place.  

Preparatory Lessons

 VY International Ballet Academy will provide standard based lessons designed in Google Slides format that will prepare your students for the field trip to the Nutcracker Ballet. The provided lessons give a brief history of ballet, a short ballet lesson, an introduction to the composer, Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky, play-along activities to popular melodies from the ballet including ‘The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,’  and ‘The Waltz of the Flowers’, an illustrated story of the Nutcracker. Included in the story narrative are video clips from a recent performance of the VY International Ballet Academy that correspond to each part of the story. 

Field Trip to the Nutcracker Performance on December 6, 2024 from 9:45-11:15

Each act of the performance will start with a story teller explaining the characters, setting and plot. Intermission will be used as a meet and greet with the dancers interacting with the students in the auditorium as the stage is set for Act II. The entire performance will be shortened to 90 minutes in order to make the experience an appropriate length for a young audience.  

Final Lessons/Evaluation (Post Performance)

In this lesson, the students would have the opportunity to discuss the performance experience, review interactive videos and play-along with activities. The students will be given a survey during this final lesson of The Nutcracker Experience in which they will be asked to respond to questions that encourage them to evaluate the performance. They will be asked if they enjoyed the performance, who was their favorite character, which part they would like to play if they had the opportunity,  and how they would change the performance.  

During the preparatory lessons the students will show that they understand musical concepts through performance (Common Anchor Standard #4), and they will identify and explain the expressive qualities in music (Common Anchor Standard #8). 

During the Nutcracker Ballet Performance, the students will evaluate the performance to determine if it fulfilled its purpose (Common Anchor Standard #9), experience the relationship between music and the other arts (Common Anchor Standard #10), and the relationship of music to history and culture (Common Anchor Standard #11). These objectives will be measured through student responses in a survey after the performance experience in the last lesson. Having the opportunity to experience a live performance will expand the understanding of the arts and the performance of them in ways beyond measure.