NYCB's 'Nutcracker' Dances Onto an 87-Foot Dome in Detroit

New York City Ballet's "The Nutcracker" opened Wednesday night on an 87-foot-diameter LED dome at Cosm Detroit, and the dancers it stars were watching from the seats. Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia, the company principals who appear in the film, sat wide-eyed in the audience as the crowd applauded their grand pas de deux and gasped at Mejia's "Sugarplum Slide" across the stage.

The venue is Cosm Detroit, a shared-reality theater on Cadillac Square — in effect, virtual reality without the clunky glasses, projected onto a borderless, curved screen overhead. Cosm filmed the production over six days in January, using 13 cameras shooting from 84 positions. That rig captured angles no conventional seat can offer: next to the dancers, above the stage, inside the orchestra pit, from the wings.

Peck, who had flown in from New York earlier that day, said: "It's so immersive. But it's really amazing that it can make you feel like you're inside the production. I didn't expect it to be like that."

What does this change for a 71-year-old holiday staple?

"George Balanchine's The Nutcracker" debuted at New York City Ballet in 1954. Since then it has become a holiday tradition and one of the most performed works in dance — nearly 100,000 people see it each year at Lincoln Center in New York. The Detroit version is a far cry from that. Wednesday's audience sat under the dome watching what looked like a full orchestra and live dancers, and the crowd could be forgiven for forgetting it was a high-tech movie rather than an actual performance.

The famous growing Christmas tree made the point. As it expanded, it seemed to burst into the top of the theater and fill one side of the dome, complete with the requisite sounds of groaning wood. The realism, Peck noted, was "realistically jarring" in the best sense — immersive enough that the ballerina herself was startled by her own performance.

Where else can audiences see it?

Cosm will present the immersive "Nutcracker" over this holiday season in four cities:

• Detroit (now open)
• Atlanta
• Dallas
• Los Angeles

Why it matters

The project takes a ballet most audiences know only from a fixed seat at Lincoln Center and rebuilds it around camera positions that don't exist in a theater — the pit, the wings, the air above the stage. For a work that has drawn roughly 100,000 viewers a year in New York since 1954, the dome format opens a second, multi-city life. Whether shared reality becomes a standard outlet for major companies or a novelty depends on how audiences in Atlanta, Dallas and Los Angeles respond this season.