Baby Bunhead to Backstage: A Full Circle Nutcracker Story

Ballet West Wardrobe Supervisor Lizzie Fisher’s history with The Nutcracker started before she was even a dancer. Her grandmother made it a yearly tradition to take the family to see the production. When Fisher started dancing as a kid at a local studio, friends invited her to audition for the show. She didn't even know that was something kids could do.

Growing Up Onstage

She landed the role of Buffoon in her very first year, then grew up dancing in the production, returning to audition for two additional years. As she moved through adolescence and hit her growth spurt, she went from being the smallest to the tallest, she knew she wasn't going to be cast as Clara or a Party Girl, but that never mattered.

“I got to be part of something big and beautiful, surrounded by inspiring peers and professional dancers,” said Fisher. “Just being in the rehearsal space with professional dancers was the best part of the whole experience and more than anything, I remember feeling like I wasn't alone, like I was part of something.”

She learned that every role came with the same expectation, to show up ready, learn the choreography, and act like a professional. No role was treated as less important than another. She remembers running around as part of the soldier regiment, becoming close with the other kids, trading gifts, and getting help sewing pointe shoes and fixing her bun before rehearsal.

“Being part of America's 1st Nutcracker™, a production whose choreography has never changed, meant being part of something historic, even in a role like Lady in Waiting,” she said. “I realized that every role helps tell the story and bring the ballet to life. For a lot of audience members, this production is their very first ballet, and being part of someone's introduction to ballet altogether felt like its own kind of special.

Fisher says if she’d been told as a young "bunhead" that she'd eventually come back full circle to work on the very production she grew up in; she never would have believed it.

Growing up in dance studios and in the Nutcracker taught her things she still uses today, such as how to be part of a team, how one dancer out of line throws off the whole picture, how to show up for the people around you and behave professionally, right down to how you walk through the hallway and how you speak. It prepared her, she says, in ways she didn't fully understand at the time.

Full Circle Moment

Now she's on the other side of it entirely. Where she once experienced the show purely as a dancer, she now has to understand the entire production. That instinct for tracking the show, she says, started all the way back in her first season as a kid in the Nutcracker.

When she got hired at Ballet West, “my mom and I just kept shaking our heads at the full-circle nature of it all. Even though I am now backstage, rather than performing, I still love being part of it, and what a miracle to be all the back at Ballet West, where this all started.”