Sugar Plum Fairy performers ready for 'The Nutcracker'

Three Sugar Plum Fairies stand poised and ready, staggered across the stage of the Musical Arts Center. Their partners take their positions, and the pas de deux of “The Nutcracker” is underway.

It isn’t often that three Sugar Plum Fairies are seen sharing a stage, but senior Jordan Martin and juniors Mary-Quinn Aber and Gabriella Johnson are only rehearsing the part they share.

Most professional ballet companies will have multiple casts, said Michael Vernon, chairman of the IU ballet department. Companies like the American Ballet Theatre will run a show for a week and have a different dancer in principle roles each night.

“But also the talent pool here is so high that I want all the students to get a chance to perform a major role,” Vernon said. “Even though it’s much more work for everybody.”

As well as being the chair of the department, Vernon is the artistic director for the IU Ballet Theater, the choreographer for “The Nutcracker” and assigned the parts for the production. Vernon said three dancers were chosen to fill the roll because of their talent.

“The Sugar Plum Fairy is a very simple role, so you have to be an experienced dancer to command the stage,” Vernon said.

Martin, Aber and Johnson each have their own dance story that brought them to the MAC stage in “The Nutcracker.” The IDS captured these stories of ballet beginnings for the three women that take on the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy.

Mary-Quinn Aber

Aber is backstage at the Musical Arts Center. The curtain is up and the audience is transported into a whimsical dream world during the Jacobs School of Music ballet department’s annual performance of “The Nutcracker.”

As Aber prepares to command the land of sweets and take the stage as the Sugar Plum Fairy, all she is thinking about is staying warm.

“I don’t get that nervous, but I’m trying to keep my body warm because you can be waiting a long time to go on,” she said.

It’s important to stay warmed up so your muscles don’t cramp when you are on stage. Saturday night will mark Aber’s second year performing the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy at IU, a role she said she’s in love with.

Aber said having performed the role last year, she can push her limits now that she is older and stronger.

But before she donned the Sugar Plum’s tutu, before she came to IU and before she made dance her life, she said it was just a pastime.

“I started dancing when I was 3 because my parents wanted to give me a hobby,” Aber said. “They put me in it, but they didn’t think I would get this intense.”

It wasn’t until she was 12 that she became serious about her dancing and decided it was what she wanted to fill her life with. Aber joined a dance studio in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where she said she started to focus on training.

Now dancing every day, Aber still has to find time to be a full-time student. She said she went to an average middle school and high school, attending school from 7:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

After school, she would only have about two hours to work on her homework before it was time to make the 45-minute drive from her hometown of Boca Raton, Fla., to the studio in Fort Lauderdale.

She would dance from 6 to 9 p.m. and then return home, complete any homework she hadn’t finished and wake up to do it all again. For her first three years of high school, Aber balanced her time between school, ballet and a social life, she said.

But the summer after her junior year, she took a giant leap toward having a
professional career.

After training in a summer-intensive program in San Francisco, she said she was asked to continue through the year. For her last year in high school, Aber moved to California for what she said was the most intensive training she had yet.

“It wasn’t as many hours, but the whole atmosphere was more intense,” she said. “It was a bigger school that fed into a company, so there was a lot more competition.”

When it came time to decide what her next step would be, college had always been on Aber’s list. She said after being introduced to the ballet atmosphere in San Francisco, though, it was clear she didn’t want to do anything else with her life.

At that time, because of the economy, ballet companies were not hiring, so Aber starting looking at colleges. After visiting IU, she fell in love.

“I loved the choreography and the reputation,” she said. “And all the dancers were
incredible.”

Now, in what she said is a much more mature dancing atmosphere, Aber gets to purely focus on improving herself as a dancer. She said the focus she has at IU has also allowed her to excel in the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy. 

“I just love it, and I don’t really think about the moves,” Aber said. “It’s so natural now my body just does it.”

Gabriella Johnson

Johnson didn’t always want to be the Sugar Plum Fairy.

“I danced when I was really young, and I hated it,” she said. “I thought it was the worst thing ever. I would be the girl crying in class.”

Growing up in a small town near St. Petersburg, Fla., Johnson said she attended a performing arts elementary school. Once she progressed to middle school, she had to pick a focus.

Since her parents were friends with a dance instructor at the school, that’s where she was placed.

“I had a teacher who I loved,” she said. “I looked up to her like she was God, and she was amazing to me. She took me under her wing, and I started to really enjoy it.”

Johnson said from then on, she wanted to spend the rest of her life dancing. Continuing through a performing arts high school and a pre-professional program at the Orlando Ballet, college wasn’t always at the top of her priorities, Johnson said.

“I made a really hard decision,” she said. “My parents really wanted me to have an education, and I fought with them on it. I just wanted to audition for a company.”

Johnson said in preparation for the college search, she auditioned for 12 schools.
IU was her first choice, and the ballet department gave her the biggest scholarship of all her picks, so she was on her way.

It was hard for her at first, she said. She still wasn’t sure if school was the right choice and didn’t know if she would be happy. She said she had wished she could go to New York and live ballet for the rest of her life.

“Now, looking back, I’m so glad I didn’t do that,” Johnson said. “Besides having a ballet career here and making a lot of great friends, I also have something to fall back on. I didn’t realize in high school how important that was.”

She said dancing professionally is still her plan because she loves to perform. She likes performing because there is always something to work for and it gives a lot back to her.

Now, having worked up to her first year performing the part of the Sugar Plum Fairy at 2 p.m. Saturday, she said it’s kind of a dream.

“You just want to be the pretty girl with a beautiful tutu and a crown,” she said. “You’re the queen of the kingdom, and all the little girls love you.”

Although Johnson said dancing the part of the Sugar Plum Fairy is a dream, she didn’t audition for the role.

Vernon assigns the roles. Johnson said when he posted the casting, she did not expect her name to be up for the Sugar Plum Fairy.

With the steps learned, she now concentrates on conveying the meaning of the piece, she said.

“I think about the music. That’s a big part of it for me,” Johnson said. “There is something you have to make special about it because you have to make the audience relate.”

Jordan Martin

Performing the part of the Sugar Plum Fairy for the second year in a row, Martin isn’t thinking about her next dance steps. She isn’t thinking about the packed house at the Musical Arts Center. She’s thinking about her face.

Even if you’re stressed and tired, she said, you have to look like you’re having fun.

“Once I get on stage, I focus just on performing, not so much the technique” she said. “I’m 22, so I should just let my body do what it knows to do.”

Martin said the Sugar Plum Fairy is a special role, and it can be very stressful. The role is demanding because the choreography is difficult, but it has to look effortless because she’s the Sugar Plum Fairy, she said.

Martin understudied for the part her sophomore year and said she was ecstatic when she got the part for the first time last year.

“Everyone knows ‘The Nutcracker,’ so the show’s a pretty big deal,” she said.

Ballet, though, wasn’t always an obvious path for Martin. Starting with her mother as her teacher, Martin said she first became serious about ballet when she was 9. For a while, Martin said she wanted to dance professionally, mostly because that’s all she knew.

“I went to school, then danced,” she said.

Going to a typical high school, Martin said she eventually quit dance for a few months her junior year to figure out if it was what she really wanted to do. Then the time came when she had to make a choice.

“I had to either keep with ballet or doing something else, so I went back to dancing,”
she said.

Martin said performing in “The Nutcracker” at home was how she found her way to IU. Someone approached her after she performed in the show in her hometown and told her she should look into studying at IU.

Martin said she feels there was a little bit of luck involved because IU was the only place she auditioned.

After starting in the ballet program on campus, it became clear dance was to be her career. Although IU made her career an obvious choice, the ballet program started to push her out of her comfort zone.

“It was really scary for me to come from such a small comfortable place where I knew everyone, then come here not knowing anyone,” she said.

Martin said she quickly adapted, though, because of the other dancers and an extremely supportive staff of instructors.

Now in her senior year, she said her confidence as a dancer has grown.
“It’s what I do every day,” Martin said. “I don’t really think about it. I wake up and I go to ballet.”