Oakland Ballet Company is pleased to bring you: "Behind Graham Lustig's ‘The Nutcracker’" as part of our “Behind Oakland Ballet” blog. Throughout December, we will be posting interviews with professional dancers, staff, volunteers, and superfans! Make sure to check...
Behind Graham Lustig’s “The Nutcracker” – Spotlight on Emily Kerr
Oakland Ballet Company is pleased to bring you: "Behind Graham Lustig's ‘The Nutcracker’" as part of our “Behind Oakland Ballet” blog. Throughout December, we will be posting interviews with professional dancers, staff, volunteers, and superfans! Make sure to check...
Behind Graham Lustig’s “The Nutcracker” – Spotlight on Peggy Peabody
Oakland Ballet Company is pleased to bring you: "Behind Graham Lustig's ‘The Nutcracker’" as part of our “Behind Oakland Ballet” blog. Throughout December, we will be posting interviews with professional dancers, staff, volunteers, and superfans! Make sure to check...
Backstage for “Diaghilev Imagery”
OBC is abuzz backstage as the company prepares for the premiere of Diaghilev Imagery this weekend at the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts Theater. Here’s what some of the artists are saying about working on Oakland Ballet Company’s latest work. Connie Strayer,...
OBC celebrates third annual gala
Oakland Mayor Jean Quan may have said it best: “Oakland’s art community does it like no one else.” Mayor Quan spoke at Oakland Ballet Company’s third annual spring gala, joining OBC friends and supporters as the event’s Honorary Chair, Saturday, April 27, at the...
A bow to the past to build the company’s future
As Oakland Ballet Company looks ahead to its annual gala this Saturday, officially launching its spring season, much has gone into making this a landmark year – and start of a new era – for the 48-year-old institution. For signs that the company is turning a new page,...
Students get back-to-basics approach with OBC
If plie is the first step learned, and the last one mastered, then there is no escaping the simplest concepts in ballet. Connecting body and mind is every dancer’s challenge, and making sense of the feeling behind a picture-perfect pose is every teacher’s task....
At the heart of every Nutcracker, Tchaikovsky’s music
As Music Director and Conductor of Oakland East Bay Symphony, Michael Morgan has become a staple in OBC’s tradition of the The Nutcracker. Morgan has held the baton for the production for more than a decade, and even with years of intimacy with the ballet, the power...
Mastering the roles of Marie and Uncle Drosselmeyer
Something as classic and traditional as The Nutcracker may seem well known to audiences, but staging for the ballet leaves plenty of room for artistic interpretation. For OBC dancers Stephanie Salts and Damon Mahoney, their roles as Marie and Uncle Drosselmeyer in...
OBC kicks off 40th Nutcracker season
A little ballet can make the holidays a whole lot brighter. Skies cleared just in time for OBC this past weekend, a small and early bit of holiday good fortune, as the company kicked off its 40th Nutcracker season with the start of an extended schedule of community...