Roll Over Beethoven

And tell Tchaikovsky the news. In Albuquerque they perform The Nutcracker to a different beat.

NewMexiKen had the enjoyable pleasure this evening of attending a tenth anniversary performance of Nutcracker on the Rocks, a reinvented version of the traditional Nutcracker ballet. The music of Tchaikovsky opens and closes the dance, but in between we hear — and the dancers dance to — James Brown (“I Got You”), Van Morrison (“Moondance”), The Velvet Underground (“Rock ‘n Roll”), Aretha Franklin (“Rock Steady”) Billie Holiday, The Rolling Stones (“Sympathy for the Devil”), Morphine (“You Look Like Rain”), Janis Joplin (“Move Over”) and others. There were nearly 100 individual dancers, some of them very young, all of them enthusiastic, many quite good. Keshet founding company member Sarah Elizabeth Bennett was terrific as the Rat Queen.

And it makes me proud and happy that I live in a time and place where some of the “snowflakes” danced in their wheelchairs — and that even the chairs were choreographed into the dance movements.

The performance was at the Roy E. Disney Center for the Arts at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, an Albuquerque gem. The run is over for this year, but make plans for 2007.

Keshet Dance Company is a community supported, non-profit professional dance company. Keshet is Hebrew for rainbow.