On a recent Saturday morning, in an over-100-year-old former church near Stillwater, a ballet student glided across the hardwood floor before leaping upwards.
“Use your arms to help you in the glissade,” Laura Daugherty reminded the dancer, who is playing a villager in St. Croix Ballet’s upcoming performance of the ballet “Coppélia.”
Daugherty, the owner and director of St. Croix Ballet and herself an alumna of the school, paused the music and scrawled a note on her yellow pad of paper. This was the first rehearsal after spring break, she explained, and it was time to refine more technical details before the show opens next month.
Students at St. Croix Ballet, ranging from elementary to high school, will present “Coppélia” at 7 p.m. May 2; 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. May 3; and 2 p.m. May 4 at the Stillwater Area High School Auditorium (5701 Stillwater Blvd., Oak Park Heights). All tickets are $24 and can be purchased online at www.stcroixballet.com.
“Coppélia,” a love-triangle romantic comedy that premiered in 1870, is based on stories by the 19th-century German author E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose writing also served as the inspiration for the iconic ballet “The Nutcracker.”
Fairly uniquely for a youth ballet school, Daugherty said, St. Croix Ballet just presents full-length classic ballets, rather than recitals showcasing shorter or one-off pieces. The school’s major spring ballets rotate annually among “Coppélia,” “Cinderella” and “The Sleeping Beauty,” and the school also performs “The Nutcracker” during the holidays.
“Dancers grow up seeing how (a show) all fits together,” Daugherty said. “They start when they’re 6 or 7 and see the older dancers doing the harder roles, and they know, if they work hard, they’re going to develop and be able to progress. … So it helps them grow as dancers, with their technique and their artistry, and it also helps build a cool community.”
Students generally progress through the school’s curriculum in four divisions: Preparatory division, or pre-kindergarten and kindergarteners, focuses on creative movement. In Division I, elementary schoolers learn foundations. As students develop strength and skill, generally around upper middle school grades, they’ll begin dancing in pointe shoes in Division II, and by high school in Division III, they’re taking on more prominent roles in the school’s annual ballets.
Rehearsals for “Coppélia” began at the end of January, but the shows don’t just represent these several months of intense rehearsals, Daugherty said: What audiences see on stage is actually years of work.
“When kids do snowflakes in ‘The Nutcracker’ and it’s really clean and together, that’s four or five years of their training we’re seeing right there,” Daugherty said. “That’s not just a few months of rehearsal. It takes years of training and commitment. But I find that very rewarding and interesting, and I think they do too.”
Daugherty, who took over the school in late 2022, was one of founder Karla Sweeney’s first students when the school opened in the early 1990s, initially in Sweeney’s house. Daugherty trained at North Carolina School of the Arts and the University of Utah, then danced with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and Colorado Ballet and returned to teach at St. Croix Ballet between 2012 and 2019.
Meanwhile, Sweeney moved the school in 1994 to its current home, a former Lutheran church officially in the city of Grant. She retired in 2012 amid a 13-year battle with aggressive breast cancer and ultimately passed away in 2015.
For much of the studio’s history, Sweeney, her successor Susan Hovey and now Daugherty have taught the Vaganova method, a classical Russian ballet technique. And, with a few adjustments, Daugherty maintains the traditional choreography in shows like “Coppélia.”
During that recent Saturday rehearsal, Daugherty was cross-referencing the dancers’ movements against a video of St. Croix Ballet’s 2022 performance of “Coppélia” — similar to what Daugherty’s own ballet teachers once did for her, albeit with a VCR and large television on a rolling cart, rather than on a slim laptop.
“This is very much how ballet works,” she said. “This is how ballet is passed on, from one generation to the next. I was taught to do (a certain movement) with my arm; now, I pass that to my students.”
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