Despite the fact that it was never performed in full in the United States until the 1940s, The Nutcracker has become as much a pillar of the year for ballet dancers as the Minnesota State Fair is for New Ulm dairy farmers. Katie Rose McLaughlin, a New-York-based choreographer and dancer with Minnesota roots (more about that later), is developing a new Nutcracker called simply A Nutcracker. (See the difference?)

The new piece, created by McLaughlin with Joshua William Gelb and Ian Axness from a story by Dan O’Neil, features four different dancers as Clara at four different points in her life. While the finished work is still a year away, McLaughlin will be presenting workshop performances of the dance-in-progress next month in Minneapolis. The performances (7:30 PM on August 14, 2:00 PM on August 15) will take place at Minnesota Dance Theatre. They’re open to the public; no reservations are required, but a $10-$25 donation is suggested.

Via e-mail, I asked McLaughlin about the development of her innovative new take on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s much-told tale.

Did you live in Minnesota for your entire life before moving to New York? How did you decide to move east, and how has that experience worked out for you?

I didn’t live in Minnesota my entire life before moving to New York. At 18 I went to the Joffrey Ballet School in New York, which had a program with the New School. They ended that program and I moved back to Minnesota where I stayed until 2004? 2005? Then I went to Chicago to do two shows with Redmoon Theater, then back to Minnesota, then back to Redmoon and Chicago where I stayed for seven months. Then back to Minnesota (while also touring the show I did in Chicago). Then I got married and moved to Pittsburgh! And from Pittsburgh I moved to New York. So basically I did a lot of bouncing around. I was in Pittsburgh because my husband (playwright Dan O’Neil) was going to grad school at Carnegie Mellon University. It was actually really great for me because they didn’t have any choreographers and many of the directors in the MFA program wanted to add movement into their pieces. So I ended up being the resident choreographer at the school while I was there. All of the collaborators that I worked with at Carnegie Mellon either lived in or were moving to New York so when Dan graduated it made most sense to move here to New York.

It has been a great experience living here. I’ve been given a lot of amazing opportunities to work with some incredible directors as well as make my own work around town.

How would you describe your work, in general, as a choreographer and dancer?

The body, as it moves, is expressing shapes, formulas, muscles, memory, balance, style, culture, emotion or lack thereof, story or lack thereof and I could go on but—as an artist, I look to capture the force of all aspects of movement and translate it into something else. I call myself a choreographer and I call what I do “dance,” but really it’s called expressing the inexpressible through the language of curated physical movement. I’m the curator.

I see my place in the choreographic landscape as a movement designer; the design differs from show to show, but the trait that runs through all of my work is an emphasis on performing with honesty and openness. I strive for audience connection, not empathy so much as an actual kinesthetic response, a firing of the brain’s mirror neurons, a recognition of humanness in both simple gestures and complex physicalities.

My current choreographic interests lie in exploring a mash-up of my history growing up in the dance community and my more current working knowledge of being a choreographer in the downtown theater world. Is it possible to marry these worlds together? What will the bodies be able to tell us when put in this new context? Can I actually create a true dance-theater hybrid?

I’m going to go ahead and say yes. Speaking of which, tell me about the genesis of your current Nutcracker project. How did it come about?

It all started back in 2012 when, over the holidays, collaborator Joshua William Gelb and I were talking about holiday traditions. He grew up watching Ovation’s “Battle of the Nutcrackers” every year. His favorite was Mark Morris’s Hard Nut. I grew up dancing in The Nutcracker every year. Performing in The Nutcracker became my way of celebrating the holidays. I realized, in these talks that The Nutcracker is the only ballet that tracks the life of a dancer—from their first ballet class to their death. Nutcracker has a role for everyone. But not only does The Nutcracker track the life of a dancer, the ballet itself, like any annually recurring holiday performance, becomes something of a time-stamp for its audience, marking the passing of time and the otherwise imperceivable and stubbornly gradual process by which we grow older. We wanted to put this on stage.

Was the story “Clara Not Clara” specifically written for this project?

Yes, Josh and I commissioned the story from Dan. When Josh and I came up with the idea for the show, we knew that we didn’t want to just interpret the E.T.A. Hoffmann story that most Nutcrackers are based on. We wanted to tell a new story highlighting this fact that the Nutcracker performance itself is this amazing time-stamp for audiences. I collaborate often with Dan, and he has dramturgy for Josh before, so we knew we wanted to work with him. Dan knew nothing of the Nutcracker ballet so we took him to see ABT’s new Nutcracker at BAM that year. He then read the E.T.A. Hoffmann story, listened to our conversations about what we were interested in exploring and then went away to write. What he wrote is this beautiful, heartbreaking story of a woman (and dancer) named Clara.

In the process of creating this work, what have you learned about, or newly reflected on regarding, the story and music of The Nutcracker? Are there still new discoveries to be made in this material?

I know I keep saying this but a lot of the new realizations I and my team made about this show were about the ballet in the context of history, and its cultural significance. I, personally, realized that this show is really an integral part of me and such an important part of my history. As one of my ballet classmates mentioned to me once, we saw more of each other than we did of our families. (At the end of my schooling I was dancing at least six hours day, six to seven days a week.) Performing The Nutcracker together became the way that we celebrated the holidays.

I also didn’t realize how much a part of me the music was until working on this project. After a long brainstorming section with my two co-creators, Ian Axness (music director) and I set out to sing from memory as much of the score as we could. I was shocked that we managed to get through about 99% of it. The music was just stored away inside me and I was delighted that I remembered so much of it. I think Josh still has a recording of part of it.

The music is one of the biggest discoveries we made with this piece. Because we created a whole new story we weren’t interacting with the Hoffmann text much, so we really relied on the music to help us tell this new story. My collaborators and I listened to the music for hours and hours and hours to hear bits that weren’t highlighted in previous shows and to use them for new effects. Ian also transformed certain sections to really play up new rhythms to help us tell this new story. What we came up with, I believe, pays homage to Tchaikovsky’s score while at the same time interpreting it to make you reinvestigate this thing that is so well known.

You’re calling the upcoming Minneapolis shows “workshop” performances. What does that mean from your perspective, and what’s the timetable for bringing a finished show to the stage?

Our time in Minnesota is just a choreographic workshop. Just time for me to be in the studio with the dancers and try out new ideas. The performances on Friday and Saturday will be the result of what we worked on that week. It is basically a chance for me to introduce Minnesota to the project and show some of the ideas that I’ve working on. It is in a studio and will be very informal.

Our timetable right now is to perform the final finished piece November 2016 to January 2017. We still have many things to figure and work out, but that is the timeline right now.

Christmas in August: is it weird?

Isn’t there something both magical and slightly off-putting about the holidays in the summertime? Nostalgia really takes hold and it almost makes you want to grab a sweater and be snuggled up cozy in bed. I’m interested to experience working on this piece when it is hot outside—I don’t know how I will feel about it. One of the cast members reminded me last year that Baryshnikov debuted his new Nutcracker for ABT in July, so there is a precedent for Christmas in the summer.

– interview by Jay Gabler