Ms. Charalambidou has danced professionally with Ballet Theatre of Maryland, Sarasota Ballet, Columbia City Ballet. Her favorite roles include the Assistant in Matthew Bourne’s Boutique, Beauty Fairy in The Sleeping Beauty, Red Pawn in Dame Ninette De Valois’ Checkmate, Spanish in William Starrett’s The Nutcracker, Sweetheart in John Cranko’s Pineapple Poll and Willi in Sir Peter Wright’s Giselle. In 2009, she was selected to perform with the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Susan Stroman’s Tony-Award winning musical Contact.

Ms. Charalambidou has performed as a guest artist with and Diesel | Fusion Dance Theatre, Amfithdromo Chorotheatro and at the Dance Platform contemporary dance festival in Cyprus.  She was also invited by the Cyprus Ministry of Culture to guest perform in the 50^th anniversary celebration of her country’s independence in 2010.

Outside of dance, Ms. Charalambidou is the co-owner of Long Body Yoga.

This is Ms. Charalambidou’s first season with Ballet San Antonio.

Following his graduation, Mr. Chen danced professionally with Singapore Dance Theatre for four years before joining Ballet San Jose in 2007. With these companies, his performances include Sleeping Beauty, La Sylphide, Raymonda, The Nutcracker, Coppelia, Romeo and Juliet, Giselle, Firebird, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mendelssohn Symphony, Who Cares?, Cinderella, Swan Lake, Don Quixote. He also performed numerous contemporary pieces, such as Tabula Rasa, Lambarena, Rite of Spring, Season of Buenos Aires, the Lost Space and Maninyas. This is Mr. Chen’s first season with Ballet San Antonio.

Kaya Wolsey has been a member of Utah Regional Ballet II and participated in Northwest Dance Project’s Launch:6. She professionally choreographed and performed with Municipal Ballet Company. Ms. Wolsey has attended summer intensives at Ballet West, Pacific Northwest Ballet and San Francisco Conservatory of Dance. Her choreography has been featured in University productions of Ballet Showcase as well as in Municipal Ballet Company productions. Her most recent piece “…and so she wore white” was selected by the University to be presented at ACDFA. She has taught many contemporary choreography workshops at Wasatch Ballet Conservatory, as well as at the Ballet West 2012 summer intensive. This is Ms. Wolsey’s first season with Ballet San Antonio.

Sally Turkel began her ballet training at Cary Ballet Conservatory in Cary, North Caroline. At age 14, she was accepted to the residential high school ballet studies program at the North Carolina School of the Arts at the University of North Carolina. Ms. Turkel has danced with Houston Ballet II, Carolina Ballet, Houston Ballet and Stiefel and Stars. She danced professionally for five seasons with Denver’s Colorado Ballet. Here she performed a wide variety of classical and contemporary roles, including the Serenity Fairy and Puss and Boots in Sleeping Beauty, Little Swans in Swan Lake and Balanchine’s Theme and Variations. She considers herself fortunate to have worked with inspiring choreographers such as Stephen Mills, Michael Pink, Emery LeCrone and Stanton Welch, among others. This is Ms. Turkel’s first season with Ballet San Antonio.

Scheherazade may be an iconic legendary and literary character, but translating her story into a stage production presents substantial problems.

In the famed collection of folk and fantasy tales known as “One Thousand and One Nights,” she is the narrator of many stories while her own serves only as the framework for the rest. The introduction to “Nights” recounts how the Persian Sultan Shahryar, who was betrayed by his first wife, vowed to behead each new spouse after a single night of intimacy. When her turn comes, Scheherazade saves her own life by entertaining the king with one story after another, eventually winning his affection for good.

Gabriel Zertuche, artistic director of Ballet San Antonio, opted to structure his “Scheherazade” as a combination of the framework tale and three of the adventure narratives from the book.

“This is something I have always wanted to do,” said Zertuche before a recent rehearsal for the new ballet, which is slated to premiere Saturday at the Carver Community Cultural Center. “I considered bringing in another choreographer for it, but this is our smaller spring production, so I decided to save the big show for later, for (when we bring it back at) the Tobin Center. This will still be a very nice production; it’s a great story and an incredible piece of music.”

The music is the popular symphonic suite of the same name by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, which was first used for a ballet by the Ballets Russes choreographer Mikhail Fokine in 1910. The composer didn’t want his score to be too precisely identified with any one of the “Arabian Nights” tales, reportedly explaining that he chose the title “because it brought to everyone’s mind the fairy-tale wonders of ‘Arabian Nights’ and the East in general.”

The three stories Zertuche picked — “Sinbad and the Sea,” “Aladdin” and “The Prince and The Princess” — should accomplish the latter. Zertuche said he saw a similar format in Milwaukee in 2001.

“It was choreographed by Kathryn Posin, who is the choreographer I was thinking of bringing to San Antonio,” he noted. “I liked her idea of telling several stories rather than the Ballets Russes’ interpretation, in which Scheherazade doesn’t even appear. (That show focused on the first wife’s betrayal.) In our version, Scheherazade and the Sultan are always on stage. It starts with her pleading for her life and then she leads him into the stories. She magically takes him to other lands and each morning they wake up back in the palace.”

Last week the choreographer was still working on the final scene, which he visualized as a celebration for the royal couple and most of the 16-member cast.

While “Aladdin” and “Sinbad” are well known, “The Prince and the Princess” is a less familiar saga whose full title is “The Adventures of Prince Camaralzaman and the Princess Badoura.” It depicts the situation of a Middle Eastern prince and a Chinese princess who are not happy about being betrothed to each other. Their respective genies “talk about how to bring these two together,” explained Zertuche. “It’s a family-friendly production, nothing too racy.”

Scheherazade and the sultan will be danced by principals Saki Yabumoto and Ian Morris; Husan Hopui will portray Aladdin, and principals Sarah Aujon and Jayson Pescasio will be the Prince and Princess.

The company hopes to stage an expanded version of the ballet in the future, ideally in cooperation with the San Antonio Symphony.

“If people want bigger they have to show up for this one,” quipped Zertuche.

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The company’s faithful fans should not worry, though. Accompanied live by the San Antonio Symphony, the 2012 rendition is not dramatically different from earlier incarnations. The storytelling is a bit livelier through most of Act I, and the cherished traditional choreography has been re-imagined by new artistic director Gabriel Zertuche without straying far from the established idiom of the ballet.

To begin with, the pageantry of the Stahlbaums’ Christmas party is all there, complete with elegant guests, excited kids and mannerly social dancing. Zertuche chose a slightly older, taller Clara (Stefanie Renee Salyers) than usually seen. Her abilities as a dancer allowed him to give her a more active dancing presence throughout the show. But her little brother Fritz (Sebastian Coronado) steals most of the party scenes as the delightfully rowdy troublemaker who breaks the nutcracker doll Clara received from her mysterious godfather, Herr Drosselmeyer (the personable Jason Cox).

As always, the high-caliber dancing doesn’t start until the journey to the magical kingdom begins. Though there’s no boat, sleigh or carriage to whisk Clara and the Nutcracker Prince (Ian Morris) away, they nevertheless manage to visit the Land of the Snowflakes en route to the Kingdom of the Sweets.

Zertuche has done a lovely job with the dreamy, winter-wonderland snow scene featuring 12 feathery ballerinas as waltzing Snowflakes who frame the crisp and delicate Snow Queen (Saki Yabumoto) and her capable King (Husan Hopuy). Their pas de deux often soars through space and the entire scene begins to shimmer in the icy whiteness when powdery snowflakes start falling from above (though a heavier “snowfall” would be welcome).

Act II is all about fabulous dancing, from the various divertissements – Spanish, Chinese, Russian, etc. – to the high-flying pas de deux of the Sugar Plum Fairy (Sarah Aujon) and her Cavalier (Jayson Pescasio), which concludes the festivities. Among the divertissements, the Russian duet danced by Andrea Alshouse and Dylan Duke is a brief interlude of folksy jumps and snappy turns that won a big hand from the opening night audience. And the Waltz of the Flowers, featuring 10 pink-clad ballerinas swirling around the fragile-as-a-flower-stem Danae Quevedo as Dew Drop, is as charming as ever.

But the winning one is always the Mother Ginger segment that unleashes the kinetic energy of adorable little gymnasts who invade the stage like a force of nature, cart-wheeling and back-flipping to the driving music. Zertuche has diluted their effect slightly by incorporating dancers into the section.

As always, there are armies of talented kids portraying mice, soldiers, angels and party guests without whom “The Nutcracker” just wouldn’t be the rich and satisfying confection that it is.

“The Nutcracker” can be seen at 7 p.m. Friday, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday at the Majestic Theatre, 224 E. Houston St. Tickets range from $18-$102 at Ticketmaster outlets.

Jasmina Wellinghoff covers dance for the Express-News.

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Though the traditional story will remain intact, new artistic director Gabriel Zertuche has put his stamp on the popular ballet with a different staging approach and new choreography.

“It’s essentially a new ballet,” he said. “For me it was all about the score, paying attention to the details of the score. I am very musical in doing choreography, and it comes across in the results.

“We have raised the bar for the dancers at all levels. While keeping the classical feel, we are using the dancers’ bodies and technique to tell the story more vividly. I told the dancers ‘We want it bigger and larger than life.’”

In today’s world, he added, dance companies must compete with dazzling acrobatic extravaganzas such as those presented by Cirque du Soleil, and thus must strive to offer more spectacular performances to meet audiences’ expectations. The new “Nutcracker” will feature a great deal of balletic bravura — leaps, turns, soaring lifts — and a fast, buoyant pace, in addition to a huge cast of more than 100 dancers, including dozens of children from area dance schools.

Performances will be accompanied live by the San Antonio Symphony under the baton of assistant conductor Akiko Fujimoto.

All solo and small-group numbers will be handled by company pros, including principals Sarah Aujon and partner Jason Pescasio as the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier; and Saki Yabumoto and Husan Hopuy as the Snow Queen and King. Danae Quevedo dances Dew Drop.

While he joined the company only a year ago, Pescasio is no novice to the role of the Cavalier. A native of the Philippines, he danced it with Ballet Philippines in 2008, he said, but Zertuche’s choreography has made the character “more exciting.”

“I think of him as a prince, regal, glowing and dignified,” he noted.

Because his pas de deux with the Sugar Plum Fairy involves a lot of daring moves, he was a bit nervous at first about performing with a new partner.

“But Sarah and I developed good compatibility. I felt, ‘I can do this,’” he said with a confident chuckle.

Despite the changes, one thing about the company’s “Nutcracker” will remain the same. The Mother Ginger segment featuring a dozen bouncing little gymnasts has been kept in. Audiences love it and so does Pescasio: “Those kids are like little ninjas. They are incredible!”

Jasmina Wellinghoff covers dance for the Express-News

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