Janica Marion

It's the experience of a lifetime for a nine year-old girl from St. Malo. Janica Marion will dance with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet during its performances of The Nutcracker starting Wednesday, December 21st.

This was the third time Janica had auditioned for the role. When she found out she'd finally made it she says, "I was really happy and excited to start practising and start knowing what we were going to do."

She started studying ballet at age 3 at St. Malo Dance and has a dream of one day becoming a professional ballerina.

Mom Kathy says Janica will play the role of an angel in The Nutcracker which involves a lot of time on stage. She explains, Janica will be on stage, "Pretty much the whole second act. They come on during the second act to make a cake with the main character, Drosselmeyer, and then they become part of the props, you might say, where they sit in the backstage and they watch all of the different country's dancers do their parts."

Janica's older sister Alexi previously earned a role in the same ballet. Kathy says Alexi really enjoyed the experience of being on stage at the Winnipeg Centennial Concert Hall. She adds, backstage was a whole other experience, watching the professional dancers interact with each other. Alexi is still dancing but is now too tall for the role.

As for Janica's dream of becoming a ballerina, Kathy says, "I'm open to anything that they might want to do. We encourage any passion that our children have to just continue in that field."

Janica is the only one of 65 students at Dance St. Malo that made the cut for the RWB. Her sister Alexi is the only other dancer from St. Malo to have made successfully made it through the auditions.