(audience applauding) (upbeat music) The show was like a rock concert.

We're capturing the true nature of the city.

Ilanga: Do you know how that energy is when we all begin to (roars) it just goes constantly.

(tap dancing) (gentle music) Audience is going crazy for us.

It just feels so good to be on stage with everybody in the community.

That audience, they just sucked up everything we did.

(flatulence sound) (audience laughs) If we smiled, they loved it.

(audience applauding) What we love about it is that we know it gives the people, the audience, the joy.

They see the joy that we have on the stage.

They see it and they take that home with them.

(light music) (soft piano music) The arts are really important to every community and many times we just take it for granted.

I can remember going to a fifth grade school classroom and I said, "So how many believe that the arts are important to their lives?"

And nobody raised their hand, right?

Nobody.

And I said, "Well, do you read a book?

Do you go to the movies?

Do you sing in the shower?"

And all of a sudden everybody raised their hand.

Arts generally bring people together.

It connects people and it allows us to see ourselves in the world in a way that we may not ordinarily see ourselves.

Arts are interpretive.

It's what each individual feels when they look at something, when they hear something.

The arts have always reflected society.

Dance among most of the arts.

Ricardo: Jazz dance has always reflected the social construct of society.

Tap dance has always been the dance style that allows us to remember where we come from.

And hip hop allows us to understand where we're going and where we are now.

Ballet, it allows us to understand how to be disciplined.

It allows us to understand how to push ourselves past our normal limits.

The question of where ballet or dance is evolving is an interesting one.

I would like to be here in 50 years to see where it's going to.

Ballet will probably die out if it's still an aristocratic white thing.

(lighthearted piano music) As a kid growing up, I was an athlete.

I became very good at baseball and I ran track and I was also in trouble from time to time.

I was what they call a JD, juvenile delinquent.

I came to dance late, at 16.

It was a way to finally, for the first time in my life, find a pathway to express myself, my inner thoughts and feelings and my soul.

I really progressed very quickly.

I could sort of sense that I was being groomed as the principal male dancer of the Boston Ballet.

I was tall, I was six feet one, and I could jump very high and within a year I was on stage and so I was on my way.

At that time, everyone was white and mostly from the suburbs and I'm a city kid from the projects.

Some people would look at me and say, "What are you?"

Being biracial with a white mother, Black father was very interesting for people both Black and white.

I remember my friend saw my father in the window.

He says, "You know, you're what they call a mulatto."

And I said, "What's that?"

"You have a Black father and a white mother."

As a kid, I always questioned what it was to be biracial and so I wanted to join Black and white urban experience with the aristocratic experience of ballet.

I guess I've become more of a community artistic activist more than an artistic director.

It means finding a way to engage the community through art that's lasting and survivable, and that can open up the minds, especially of young people, all colors, all stripes.

(light drumming music) Through the first five or six years it was all very experimental.

(upbeat music) We were more community based with a few professional dancers in it.

(soft music) It was more radical presence, you know, hey, we're making a statement here.

(audience cheering) The first show was kind of rough, but it was a big success.

We were at the Strand Theatre, it was sold out.

We did three shows.

Melodi: The Strand is in Uphams' Corner in Dorchester.

We have a Korean Asian community here.

We have Irish community, we have Cape Verdean, other Hispanic communities here.

So we have everybody in this neighborhood and they're close.

We bring in those people that may not necessarily come to this area because there hadn't been shows that were welcoming.

With Boston being as segregated as it was before, people weren't in a comfortable place where they wanted to be involved with certain things and that is changing now and it has to change for a city to progress, to be progressive, to move forward, to be culturally inclusive.

I think Urban Nutcracker was part of that propulsion to say, "Hey, the Strand is alive and it's kicking and it's in our community."

And then we have this Nutcracker that's not a regular Nutcracker, so it brought in people from different places.

It brought in schools from the suburbs that if for no other reason were curious about what is an urban nutcracker?

What is that all about?

(heavy beat and orchestral musi Gianni: Seeing how diverse it was and coming from the Boston Ballet of course, it was like, wow, this is so cool to be in a Nutcracker where they have hip hop, tap dancing, and everything was just a little bit out of the box of being in the classical world.

Melodi: Community is the heartbeat of the city.

If you don't have an outlet for those communities and those smaller groups, then you lose something in the city.

It's like taking arts out of the school.

When you take them out of the school, you've lost something very important.

Lee: It's clear that the brilliance of Tony is to draw upon the diversity of Boston and bring that rich diversity and all of its many forms and permutations to the stage and he's doing it in a city that has been very troubled around the issue of race.

Janelle: I believe there's a part for everybody here.

If you can do one type of dance or another, it's kind of all inclusive and I feel like it brings in the audience.

It's not just gonna be straight ballet.

Ilanga: We've had the Russian dances and the- Georgian dancing in which was really wild 'cause these guys would like hit the swords and sparks would, you know, like it was for real.

It wasn't like pretending.

Sword dancing.

Turkish dancing.

The Flamenco versus the hip hop dancer We have the Indian, the Bollywood.

The Bollywood, yeah.

Ricardo: Everyone that I spoke to were really thrilled with the fact that we were incorporating so much of our community within the show.

It was like, oh my God, we want more of this, we want more.

(light music) Tony: When I think of myself as a dancer, I said, "Did you really dance?

Could you really do that stuff?"

I have to look at the pictures and say, "Yeah, you did."

I'm teaching and I choreograph.

I sort of found that passion that I lost when I stopped dancing.

(upbeat music) Ricardo: Dancing gave me this idea of I have a personality, I'm an individual and because of that and because people recognize me as a dancer, a lot of that I'll say for lack of a better term positive self-esteem just started to grow.

AJ: I started in the Urban Nutcracker when I was eight in 2012.

I've been many roles.

The main one is Clarisse, which is what we call our Clara, the lead role.

Oh I love it.

I just love performing and I love performing the Urban Nutcracker.

Being able to celebrate so many different parts of Boston through dance is I think amazing.

We were looking for a school that represented the community we wanted to be part of, and when we saw at Tony's was that environment that represented the Boston we wanted AJ to know, the diversity in where people came from, diversity in backgrounds, the diversity in body types.

Everything was what we thought AJ would benefit from and what we as a family think is important.

Battement, battement, plie, and turn.

I think any parent is lucky to find the community for their kids.

We were very fortunate by that and so these schools like this like Tony's are special in that what they give back to the community and what they give to the parents and especially the kids who grow up dancing in them.

(light music) Erika: When I was a child at Boston Ballet School I was told I could not be a party child or Clara because I was Black.

That was my first like realization that I was different.

When I was growing up, there were no Black women in the company.

There were no Black teachers.

Every year in Boston Ballet we would get evaluations at the end of the year and I would say, "When are you gonna have a Black Sugarplum?"

And every year I got a different response.

The arts sector in Boston hasn't served communities of color in the past.

It's not really something that is done on purpose necessarily.

It's a two-way street.

Sometimes it's a matter of people of color segregating themselves by not being comfortable and sometimes it's an organization that creates separation just by not expanding who they're reaching out to.

(light piano music) AJ: Ballet's very binary.

I'm non-binary.

It's still a bit of a struggle trying to find my place.

But as I've gotten older I have met other non-binary dancers which I think has really helped me decide that I don't have to stop doing what I love just because of what I identify as.

Janelle: Tony asked me to do Sugarplum just the variation at the school show and at the Strand and all the little kids they saw me in this tutu and they were like, "Woo."

So then the next year he had me do it the full thing.

You were Boston Ballet's first Black Sugarplum.

Yep.

Interesting.

<v ->Yeah.

And so I was looking at Arabian Queen for seven years and somebody said, "No, look down."

And I saw my name down for Sugarplum and I was like, "Oh."

And I was just like, "wow, this is the neatest thing ever" They had CityDance kids come to the show and they had the children draw their favorite part of Nutcracker and somebody drew a little brown Sugarplum fairy and that was really sweet.

Impressive, they were impressed.

It was good to see.

It was 'cause I mean, you know, one of the whole things about CityDance was getting these kids from Boston Public Schools interested and especially little brown children.

It was really nice to see that these kids were like getting to see this on stage.

Lee: The difference between equality and equity is opportunity.

For many of the young people who come to these productions for the very first time, that world is invisible to them.

It has been invisible to them.

It's invisible to their parents, it's invisible to communities.

(bright music) And what we want to do and need to do is to make the invisible, visible.

So that all can participate in the joy, the exhilaration, the excitement.

(light upbeat music) Tony has actually had people see Urban Nutcracker, sign up for his school and eventually get to be a part of it.

It's all about our community.

Erica: Kids come to see the Urban Nutcracker that maybe have never seen ballet before or dance at all, and then they suddenly wanna come here because they wanna be in the Urban Nutcracker.

Ilanga: And they begin to realize "God, I can be in that?"

That become like a buzz through the city, and the kids, we had a lot of kids coming for the audition.

Tony was the one that initiated that whole sweep of going into the community to get dancers, canvassed the area.

I think it's also important that like our auditions are open to everybody.

Gianni: You have these personalities that come to audition that when, let's say for example, we say, okay, it's time to put on the pointe shoes and do your thing.

And we teach 'em a few steps and then you see them meltdown.

They go, "Oh my God, I'm not a ballet.

I cannot put pointe shoes."

But then we talk to them and says, "Okay, what can you do?"

At one point they were melting but then you bring what they do best and they shine.

(upbeat orchestral music) A lot of our inner city kids think that ballet is a dance style for the rich, you know, the high society.

It's like, no, ballet is an art form for everyone.

You just need someone to teach it.

Same thing with hip hop.

Hip hop is not only for the inner city, it's not only for one class of people or one facet of people, one culture, it's for everyone.

Having both of those things within the Urban Nutcracker it allows these kids to be able to say, okay, there are no limits.

I'm learning this that I didn't think I could learn.

I'm doing this that I didn't think I could do.

Gianni: When I talked to Tony about bringing one of the students who had Down syndrome and I said to Tony, Tony, what about if we have one of my students come be part of the production?

I mean, there was no question asked.

It was bring him in, let's put him in the show.

[Teacher] Left food behind, take it to the right.

Because he thought that that was so important to have somebody from this population to be part of the production of the Nutcracker.

I mean, this has become his life.

Tony: The Nutcracker, Urban Nutcracker in this case, is a family show that the parents feel happy that their kids are being inspired to become better successful adults.

There are multi-generations where he's had the kids of kids, he had his teachers come back and that was a big thing for us learning how rooted it was in the community.

I've always wanted to, you know, be that mentor.

Then we're gonna go straight to fifth, same thing as first, plie.

And I think that just came from wanting to share my love of dance and wanting to help build the community the way the people before built my community.

Good, don't look down, and away from the barre.

Being in the Urban Nutcracker also just gave me that drive to want to teach.

There has been wonderful talent that's been through the production who have moved over to the Boston Ballet, which is, it's been great.

I mean it's, you know, we're feeding the bigger picture of the art.

(tap dancing) And then you had like Khalid and myself who were, you know you caught us when we were budding and just starting and then how we've grown and how we've done our own thing as well.

So I think that's one of the big things about the Urban Nutcracker as well is that it's done the special thing of introducing these brand new artists that have really put Boston on the map as an artistic city.

We've been a producer of many shows over the years that traditionally don't do well in segregated cities.

All right.

They just don't.

What Urban Nutcracker does is breaks down that barrier.

(light orchestral music) The key to legitimizing shows as much as you possibly can is to play downtown and to play to new audiences and figure out how you get the diverse audiences to come and see you downtown.

And our goal was to get shows to come in here that would ask the African American or Black community to come downtown, ask the Latin community to come downtown, ask the Brazilian community to come downtown.

And I'm very pleased to say we've been very successful at that.

(light upbeat music) The idea is to bring people into that community to have these great experiences in the theaters.

It will bring not only new revenue but also will revitalize the theaters.

Our theater district here in Boston is iconic, so to be able to bring the Urban Nutcracker into that setting I think helps us to reimagine what it means to be iconic.

It helps us to reimagine what it means to be part of the canon.

In fact, what Tony is doing is reimagining the canon and is making a clear statement that the arts don't belong to a privileged few, but they belong to all of us and all of us from different groups and representations can and should participate in the audience as cast members and as part of the crew.

Urban Nutcracker has really left an impact on the community in the city within the whole theater culture of the city.

Strong impact and it deserves the city because both have exchanged very much.

Both have put in a lot.

The city has given us a lot with the children, the community and we have given them a lot with the arts that we pour out.

There are cities who are interested in what we are doing because they know Urban left the impact.

(lighthearted jazzy music) I remember seeing his Nutcracker and I remember thinking, "Oh, that's a great idea."

You know, to not be limited to the musical tracks of "The Nutcracker."

Taking a little more freedom with the musical structure I think influenced me for sure.

I think the Brooklyn Nutcracker speaks to our Brooklyn community.

It's a production where people can see themselves, where people can joyously celebrate the energy of Brooklyn, the people of Brooklyn.

And I think it's really important to provide a production that is inclusive.

(dramatic orchestral music) Gianni: I think that this production has the body for it to become a monument of the city of Boston.

And you know, I believe that this will continue.

It will outlive us.

The arts have a future.

Any other Nutcracker you'd see it's the Nutcracker.

You know what was going to happen.

(Acapella singing) Ricardo: But with the Urban Nutcracker, you didn't.

There was something brand new.

That's part of why it will always evolve.

People are gonna know, oh it's the Urban Nutcracker, what are they doing this year?

Janelle: He brings in what's kind of current and puts that in the foreground prologue perhaps.

So that's why it's always evolving.

It's always kind of staying current, but then keeping that you know, the old school stuff in there too.

Melodi: Making people's comfort level change and making people feel included and exposing those different cultures to each other and to other neighborhoods.

It helps people grow.

Gianni: Tony has been able to keep it very fresh always.

Every year he adds something, he takes something out.

You don't know where he's gonna take it, you know, he comes up with these ideas, they're like we all look around and say, "Okay, is that gonna happen?"

Tony: I feel very fortunate that I am at my age of 75 years old surrounded by young people that are involved in creating and being artistic.

I'm just really happy that the project boy from Boston has a show downtown.

(dramatic orchestral music) (audience applauding) (bright jazzy music)