‘This Isn’t the Typical Ballet’: Local Orchestra, Ballet Studio To Present a Jazz Nutcracker

New World Ballet artistic director Victor Temple has danced “The Nutcracker” countless times over the years.

“It’s what you do during the holidays,” he says.

So when Temple was finally at the helm of his own dance company, Santa Rosa’s New World Ballet, he was eager to try something different. When the idea of reinventing the old chestnut with a jazz orchestration came to life, he ran with it, tapping the Marcus Shelby Orchestra to resurrect Duke Ellington’s epic 1960 “Nutcracker Suite.”

“Imagine the Cotton Club in the 1940s,” Temple says. “The costumes, the music, the dancing — everything is of that period.”

Traditionalists will still recognize the sugar plum fairies and sabre-swinging mice, but now songs like “Toot Toot Tootie Toot” and “Sugar Rum Cherry” steal the show. It’s only fitting that poet Enid Pickett, who was named the first-ever poet laureate of the Healdsburg Jazz Festival a few years back, plays the narrator — weaving some of her original meter into the mix.

After decades in the dance world, Temple knows what moves audiences. He grew up poor in Alabama (Temple says he didn’t own a pair of shoes until he was about to start kindergarten) and got his big break when world-famous ballerina Sonia Arova saw him breakdancing on the streets of Chicago in the 1980s. He went on to perform with the Dance Theater of Harlem, the Oakland Ballet, Cirque du Soleil, American Repertory Ballet and Shanghai Ballet before assuming the leadership of New World Ballet in 2005.

New World Ballet needs all of the resilience Temple developed as he came up in the dance world. The nonprofit company gets by on a tight budget and relies on donations to help make the shows happen. Its Nutcracker production is an important source of income as well as a way to celebrate the students’ many talents. Now in its third year, Temple and executive director Tiffany Jimenez recently raised $2,000 to keep the dream of this year’s show alive.

“We really need community support to make this happen,” says Jimenez, who oversees the company and dances in addition to her work as a nurse with the Sonoma County Indian Health Project.

The holiday production goes hand in hand with New World Ballet’s courageous mission to serve the underserved in the community and give chances to those who don’t get many. Temple sees it as an opportunity to repay the favors that brought him to the dance world.

“I want to find that kid just like me. I want to give back to the community — not just the poor, not just people of color, but everybody. Anybody who wants to dance,” says Temple.

“If you never had the opportunity to study formal classical ballet, then here is the chance. I have never, ever turned anyone away for the lack of payment or the lack of resources. I have never done it, and I will never do it.”

The dancing isn’t just for those on stage. A “Nutcracker” set in Harlem can be very liberating, Temple says, and a welcome excuse to let loose during the holidays.

“This isn’t the typical ballet, you know, in the sense of where you got to come in and stay prim and proper and clap politely…There’s no pretentiousness about it. This is people on the edge of their seats, jumping up and down, clapping along with the music. Nobody’s sitting around sterile. You see grandma getting up and dancing along with it. Whatever you feel like doing. You want to jump up and shout and dance along with it? Go ahead. And at the end of it, [the dancers] all walk out on the stage, and they all get standing ovations.”