Nutcracker as an adult - not fun

A complainey post. Looking for commiserating and and advice you may have to bring back the fun

I'm a 41yo lifelong dancer. This year, I kinda ramped up and have been taking more classes. Because I love it and dancing makes me feel good.

One of the studios I take classes at is a more serious ballet studio and both the beginner and intermediate adult classes there are fun! They decided to let adults do Nutcracker this year and I signed up because it sounded fun and I could use the extra training and exercise.

Except it's turning out to be... Less fun. The director took over rehearsal and her first action was cutting the adults (and others) from our main dancing scene. And her rehearsals are confusing - I'm very comfortable improv-ing background party scene actions, but she seems to want very specific things that change each week and she's terrrrrible at communicating them. And nobody seem sure of cues - instead of running one part then repeat (my memory is not what it used to be for choreo!), we run the WHOLE first act and it just feels chaotic and confusing. The kids are running their choreography during their classes in the week, but the adults aren't because there's only a handful of us that are doing it.

Additionally, I actually bought tickets to and watched their performance last year so I kind of know what to expect. And it's a very good performance! But also cleeeearly a -student- performance, ya know? It's clearly not professional and I feel like she's taking it all too seriously. She keeps saying she won't let us go on stage without feeling confident and I'm like - well I WAS confident and felt good about it all but now I'm pretty sure you think I'm terrible. And I know I am truly holding my own, so ugh.

So I don't think I'll be doing this next year. Which is a bummer, because I was so excited! All us adults are feeling this way and have discussed it. The instructor for the regular adult classes is also involved and feels similarly, but not much she can really do bc the director is the director iykwim.