ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) — The Rochester City Ballet will present a prior year recording of ‘The Nutcracker’ virtually this holiday season.

Given the restrictions and protocols of the COVID-19 pandemic, RCB Artistic Director Robert Gardner said this is the best option for the company Monday during News 8 at Noon.

“We are going to be streaming a past performance,” said Gardner. “We tried to figure out some way that we could do it live-streaming, but the logistics and the protocols that are in place would have made us have to dumb down the performance so much that we wouldn’t have the same feeling, the same holiday magic that ‘The Nutcracker’ brings.”

The performance will stream from Thanksgiving, November 26 until Christmas Eve, December 24. “I decided that we would stream it for that time period, through the holidays so you could watch it at your leisure,” explained Gardner. “If you have young children, because it is a two-act story ballet, you could stop and start, so you’d have the same options that you do with Netflix.”

To get your tickets for ‘The Nutcracker’ visit RochesterCityBallet.org.

Gardner, who is preparing to finish his first full season with the Rochester City Ballet, is already looking forward to 2021 and the potential for live performances. “We’ve pushed everything out until spring, early summer that I had planned and we hope that we will be able to present in the theatre with new works. In late May we are hoping we will be in the theatre. We have planned ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ which is a really wonderful ballet production of Shakespeare’s classic. We have to – like everyone else – wait and see what happens. So we’ll try to do some things virtually. We’ll present some virtual performances of past favorite works for our patrons, but we hope by Spring that we’ll be able to get onto the stages in the theatre and have people – maybe in smaller numbers – come and experience live dance.”