‘Toy Shelf’ mixes the old with the new

This weekend Ballet Spokane leaps into the holiday season with a grande jeté into a magical shop where toys come to life, dolls dance, animals frolic and children play.

“The Toy Shelf,” a narrated and danced story created by Ballet Spokane Artistic Director Janet Wilder, features the professional company, trainees and 35 children from area elementary schools and local dance studios.

Previously an annual production by Dance Theatre Northwest, the holiday tradition features an updated story line this year.

In the hour-long performance, a schoolteacher takes her class to Mr. Marionette’s toy shop. On the shelves are characters from favorite children’s stories, including Puss in Boots, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Alice in Wonderland, Little Bo Peep and Cinderella. The enchanted toys come to life and dance.

“Some technically challenging dances performed by company members interweave with children’s dances,” Wilder said in a recent interview. “The ballerina doll and the toy soldier perform a demanding pas de deux and the Spanish dolls wow the children with a fiery tarantella during the first act.”

As night falls, burglars attempt to rob the shop. During the battle that ensues, the book of fairy tales is torn to pieces. Illiterate elves, danced by Marcy Ray and Emily Schmedding, attempt to reconstruct it, but the stories get mixed up.

When the narrator reads from the book in the second act, Bo Peep dances with gingerbread cookies and Alice partners with the Big Bad Wolf. In one of the featured dances of the show, associate artistic director Phaedra Jarrett as Cinderella partners with Ryan Callen as the toy soldier. Eventually the stories are pieced back into their proper order.

This year’s performances are at the Interplayers theater on its thrust stage. In this intimate setting, audience members are close enough to see facial expressions, the nuances of body language and the technical aspects of ballet.

Performers must, in turn, be aware of every aspect of their presentations – a fact that Wilder kept at the forefront as she auditioned the elementary children for the production.

“I used several criteria as I conducted the auditions,” she said. “The children were required to perform the choreography. They needed the ability to stay focused and to learn the dances quickly. Finally, they had to be open to accepting coaching and to incorporate suggestions into their performance.”

Thinking back, she laughed and added, “The auditions were a pretty arduous.”

This is the third in Ballet Spokane’s Children’s Series. The final production in the series will be “The Tales of Beatrix Potter” in the spring.