Jennifer Quibell has spent the last month wrangling mice and polar bears, but she’s no zookeeper. As the rehearsal director entrusted with preparing more than 70 local child dancers for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Nutcracker, Quibell is bringing together an integral part of the touring classic.

Each year, Ballet B.C. presents a visiting company’s version of the iconic holiday show, and every time, it offers the region’s aspiring young dancers a chance to share the stage with pros, dancing in everything from the beloved party scene to the raucous battle that explodes beneath the giant Christmas tree.

“When they get to meet the company members and talk to them, they’re in awe, in absolute awe, of the performers,” explains Quibell from Nanaimo, from which she commutes each weekend to train the young dancers in Vancouver. “It will give them confidence that they’re working with a professional company.”

For Ballet B.C. artistic director Emily Molnar, it’s a way to connect with the dance community once a year, drawing students from 20 schools across the region.

“Being able to give them this opportunity—it can sometimes make the difference between choosing to do this or not,” she explains to the Straight over the phone from a rehearsal hall at the Scotiabank Dance Centre. “Feeling that beautiful energy of being with a professional company can absolutely solidify that you want to make that journey—or sometimes it can go the other way and you can say, ‘I’m really not cut out for this.’ But every kid I’ve met afterward wants to go on dancing.”

This Nutcracker also offers children an inside look at the scale of a huge production in a big, formal venue, complete with technical rehearsals, costume fittings (200 of them for this rendition), and lavish staging that includes a six-metre-high Christmas tree—all of which combine to show young dancers what it means to take on ballet as a career.

For Quibell, who only started working with the children (who were chosen from auditions) in October, it’s a tight time line for teaching the kids, aged seven to 12, the choreography for such a big show. She separates them to train in different groups: the party children, mice, angels, and, in the RWB’s uniquely Canadianized version, Mounties. Adding to the workload this year are the newly enlisted polar bears, who now appear in the famous snow scene.

It’s a big job, but perhaps no one is better suited to it than Quibell, who danced her first role as Clara when she was 12 and, as she puts it, “practically grew up in Nutcracker most of my life”, from performing it to stage-managing different versions. She’s taught everywhere from Nanaimo’s Kirkwood Academy of Performing Arts to Parksville’s Innovate Dance Arts and has acted as ballet mistress of the children’s casts in Ballet B.C.’s visiting Nutcracker for the past five years.

What both she and Molnar remark on is the high level of the children taking part, with the show drawing from schools as far afield as Maple Ridge, North Vancouver, and Richmond, as well as from Vancouver stalwarts like Arts Umbrella.

“We see more and more kids and more and more schools cropping up,” Molnar says, hypothesizing that it may be the sheer competitiveness of the dance-training scene here that keeps the standards high. She says that two decades ago, when she was dancing with the National Ballet of Canada, there always seemed to be standout young talent hailing from B.C. And in her own company, Ballet B.C., she has drawn dancers from everywhere from Arts Umbrella to the Goh Ballet Academy to the Richmond Academy of Dance. “The thing to share is we should be proud of that and we have a reputation for that really great training out here.”

That level of talent may make things easier for Quibell, but teaching complex choreography to scores of mice and Mounties in a matter of weeks is no simple task. Making her chore harder is the fact that, for the first time this year, she’s also been training kids for the Nanaimo and Victoria tour stops by the RWB. Asked what she’ll do when the last of these shows ends, Quibell laughs and says, “I’m going to Maui”—about as far from the snowscapes, pond hockey, and polar bears of The Nutcracker as you could get.

The Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s The Nutcracker is at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre from December 12 to 14.