Are you looking for an entertaining and time-honored way to enrich your holiday season? Tickets are still available for the final weekend of the San Jose Youth Ballet production of “The Nutcracker,” which happens to feature Gilroy ballerina Megan Doyle. The 13-year-old teen dances the role of “Snow Fairy.”
Performances this weekend are scheduled for 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. Dec. 8, and at 1 p.m. Dec. 9 at The School of Arts and Culture Theater at the Mexican Heritage Plaza in San Jose.
At last weekend’s production, several audience members approached Doyle after the show and praised her performance, calling it a “beautiful” and “graceful.”
“This is my first solo role in the ‘Nutcracker’ and it has been really fun,” Doyle beamed “I hope a lot of people come to see the show this weekend. The whole cast is great.”
Doyle began dancing at the age of 5 at the Morgan Hill Dance Center on Caputo Drive in Morgan Hill. She danced in her first “Nutcracker” production with the non-profit Morgan Hill Ballet in 2007. For the past 18 months, she has been training exclusively with internationally renowned dancer and trainer Xavier Ferla at Dance Theatre International in San Jose.
Doyle aspires to be a professional ballerina, a highly specialized occupation. In 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that only 25,600 jobs were available to ballet dancers. The Bureau also reports the job prospects for professional dancers are only expected to rise by 11 percent between now and the year 2020.
Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker has been charming packed theaters since it debuted in St. Petersburg in December of 1892. Its first appearance in the U.S. was in 1944, performed by the San Francisco Opera Ballet.
The San Jose Youth Ballet is a non-profit organization. It’s vision is to inspire joy in children, their families and the community through dance. The San Jose Youth Ballet’s mission is to provide extraordinary performance opportunities to aspiring young dancers.
For tickets to “The Nutcracker” or for more information on how to support the nonprofit San Jose Youth Ballet, visit their website at sjyb.org.
