San Francisco Ballet is taking its signature holiday production beyond the War Memorial Opera House this year, launching a virtual reality version of its Nutcracker that audiences can watch through smart glasses. Nutcracker: The Immersive Experience combines virtual reality video with recorded music from the Grammy Award-winning SF Ballet Orchestra and the San Francisco Girls Chorus, giving viewers a way to step inside the company's famed production without buying a ticket to the opera house.
The project is a partnership between San Francisco Ballet, Google, YB and XREAL, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The experience will launch on Google's Android XR platform and on XREAL AURA smart glasses through YB's CultVRe app, and it includes Act I of former SF Ballet Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson's Nutcracker, which is set in San Francisco in 1915. A separate release describes the collaboration as bringing together YB, SF Ballet, Google and XREAL to put viewers inside the production, as reported by PR Newswire.
Snow Falls Around the Viewer, Not Just On Stage
The technical specs behind the project are striking on their own. The footage was captured in stereoscopic 8K using a Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive three-camera array, according to a report from 9to5Google, which also notes the experience brings the ballet's Snowfall sequence directly into the viewer's surroundings rather than keeping it confined to a screen.
SF Ballet Artistic Director Tamara Rojo said the experience will bring audiences closer to the Nutcracker story, per the Chronicle's report. She added that innovative partnerships like this one can introduce ballet to people who are new to dance or who live too far away to attend the annual San Francisco tradition in person. Hector Prieto, also quoted in the Chronicle's coverage, said the experience places viewers inside the magic of the show.
A Tradition Dating Back More Than Eight Decades
San Francisco Ballet has a long claim to Nutcracker history. The company says it presented America's first-ever Nutcracker in 1944, according to San Francisco Ballet's own account. This year's onstage run marks the company's 22nd anniversary of performing the classical ballet, with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's score accompanying the production as it has for generations of San Francisco audiences.
The in-person production returns to the War Memorial Opera House and runs through December 27, with tickets starting at $59. The virtual reality launch is not the company's first foray into bringing Nutcracker beyond the stage. During the 2020 pandemic season, SF Ballet offered an interactive online holiday experience that included a full prerecorded production along with games and activities, according to a report from ronniesawesomelist.com.
Part of a Broader Push Toward Immersive Dance
San Francisco Ballet is not alone in experimenting with headset and glasses-based access to classic repertoire. Birmingham Royal Ballet launched a virtual-stage project using immersive technology aimed at helping neurodivergent audiences access its shows for the first time, as reported by The Guardian. That company's own NutcrackAR project recreates its elaborate Nutcracker set in augmented reality, letting viewers walk around and even pick up virtual objects inside the scene.
Even so, barriers remain. A photographer who worked on Birmingham Royal Ballet's Swan Lake VR experience told the Guardian that widespread access to the headset technology needed to view this kind of content is still a logistical challenge. Elsewhere, a New York City Ballet production of The Nutcracker reportedly began its own immersive chapter on a domed screen in Detroit, according to a brief mention from the New York Times, though further details of that project were not available.
For San Francisco Ballet, the glasses-based experience offers another way into a story the company has told on stage for more than 80 years, even as the traditional production continues to sell tickets at the War Memorial Opera House through the end of December.
