Help Brattleboro School of Dance!

Brattleboro School of Dance needs your help. Please share!

Brattleboro School of Dance has been providing high-quality dance instruction and dazzling productions for the past 45 years, and this year we will be producing The Nutcracker — a holiday favorite for so many in our community. All revenue from our performances goes directly to keeping BSD alive and to providing dance scholarships and opportunities to our students, young and old. However, we are up against a unique set of circumstances this year, owing to the fact that almost all of our props and equipment tragically disappeared. It’s a strange and horrific fluke accident that has left us completely and utterly speechless, as well as prop-less.

Here’s a short version of the story…

A few years ago we rented a storage unit to safely house the majority of our Nutcracker props and supplies. Shortly after the 2021 production, when we arrived to pick up the items, we found it empty! After some investigation we discovered that the person responsible for clearing out units had mistakenly disposed of our belongings instead of the contents in the unit right next to ours.

Everything we stored is now in a landfill. The list of items is long and expensive: our Mother Ginger apparatus, the Soldier and Kissy Doll boxes, the snow that falls during Waltz of the Snowflakes, the dragon, numerous rolls of marley flooring, and all of the Victorian furniture for the party scene.

We are currently working with a lawyer to negotiate with the insurance and storage companies. We are doing our utmost to be granted our rightful amount of funds that covers the value of these precious (and in some cases, irreplaceable) items. However, the process to be reimbursed for those losses has been longer than expected and is still not resolved.

Brattleboro School of Dance is not willing to sacrifice our Nutcracker tradition. Since the production is in a few short months, we are doing what we always do to make the show happen — thinking and working creatively as a community!

There are many ways to support our efforts — volunteering, spreading the word about our programs, providing financial assistance, and by sharing our story online! Our multi-pronged approach also includes this GoFundMe, mobilizing volunteers to rebuild sets, and collecting items on our list which we will share on Facebook and via email. Every year, we strive to build upon and improve what we’ve done in previous Nutcracker productions. Help bring us closer to our goal of having the best Nutcracker show yet! We need all the help we can get and you can help us meet our goal!