The link to the original article in The Signal may be found here.
The woman who makes the magic happen
Leica Hardy has been directing the Nutcracker in Halifax for all of its 33 years.
Dec. 18, 2025 | 3:01 p.m.
10 min read
The girl stands, poised and collected. Then, taking two quick steps, she springs into the air. Her arms are straight above her head. To an untrained eye, it would look perfect. To Leica Hardy, it looks wrong.
“No, no, not at all,” Hardy says firmly. Her voice carries across the bright and bare dance studio. Around 30 girls – every time you count them, the number changes – sit cross-legged, watching.
Hardy rises from her chair and crosses the floor with the assured walk of someone who knows exactly how to make a ballet movement beautiful. This includes knowing where an arm should be placed and how a foot should be pointed.
The young dancer, who is perhaps 12, resets herself into position. Hardy places a hand on the girl’s raised ankle and the other hand on her hip. She bends the dancer’s leg even further into a 45-degree angle, slightly adjusts her pelvis, and turns her shoulders. She is delicately moving the girl like an artist creating a Renaissance sculpture. hHa
When Hardy steps back, the girl’s top half is curved into a near-perfect circle. Her foot and head almost meet. Now the dancer understands. Now she must execute.
The room is silent as Hardy returns to her chair at the front of the room.
Stride, stride, leap. The girl’s body folds into the shape Hardy sculpted seconds earlier. She lands, and the rest of the girls erupt in supportive applause.
“Yes!” Hardy exclaims, satisfied, and the girl offers a sheepish smile.
This has taken the artistic director of The Nutcracker less than four minutes. After 33 years of directing the Halifax production of the iconic Christmas show, seeing how to improve the dancing comes easily. Leica (pronounced Lisa) Hardy knows its rhythms and limbs as if they were her own. She can diagnose a flawed jump the way a doctor hears a bad cough. Her corrections – precise and blunt – stem from decades of experience.
Rehearsals for The Nutcracker begin in early September. Every Friday night and Saturday afternoon through the long fall, dancers aged 10-18 gather at Halifax Dance to build a magical world filled with dancing candy canes, sugar plum fairies, and even a Chinese dragon. By November, the choreography is ingrained in young minds and bodies. Hardy works on polishing, sharpening, and enriching.
Ballet is discipline. It’s art with structure. Dance instructors everywhere can earn a reputation for being flinty, even harsh. Hardy doesn’t coddle, but the girls can tell that behind her strict exterior she is good-hearted. At a Nutcracker rehearsal she is the commandant. When she speaks, everyone falls in line because this, they know, is their best chance for success.
An untraditional tradition
The overall themes of The Nutcracker tend to stay the same across all productions. A young girl – Clara (or sometimes Mary) – is gifted a wooden nutcracker which, in the fine-tuned magic of ballet, transforms into a soldier and then a prince. At times the story darkens as Clara and the Nutcracker fight a Mouse King and journey through magical realms. Then Clara wakes up in her room, and the Nutcracker is simply a toy in her hands. Was it all a dream? Well, that depends on the audience’s willingness to believe in magic.
The story originates from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 short story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. In 1844, Alexandre Dumas softened the story to be less scary for children. The ballet’s music was composed by a world-famous composer, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, in 1891-92. The score is recognizable, exciting, and whimsical. Even the least ballet-inclined person can probably hum a few notes from the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.
When the ballet premiered in 1892 at the Marinsky [sic] Theatre in St. Petersburg, the production was reviewed as boring and clumsy. And that might have been that, except Tchaikovsky’s score shone through, holding out hope for the ballet’s potential. It didn’t dance into North America until 1944, and then to Canada in 1955. At one production in Ohio, a young (later Sir) Roger Moore brought Clara’s journey to life with his narration.
In 1991, the general manager of Symphony Nova Scotia approached Hardy to conceive a local version of what was by then a holiday tradition. At the time, Hardy was teaching at Halifax Dance. She and Graham Whitehead of Mermaid Theatre had already been exploring a collaboration – something that mixed dance with puppetry. With Symphony Nova Scotia’s idea of a Nutcracker, the two realized they had been handed the perfect blank canvas.
For the next year, Hardy and Whitehead lived inside the story. They drafted, cut, and experimented. They wondered: who would be the centre of this tale? Who should carry the narrative? Traditionally, men played a big role in the story, but Halifax had few male dancers. So Hardy and Whitehead asked a simple question: how could the story be told in a way that mainly involved only girls?
A girls’ dormitory… a world of young women. (The nutcracker prince and a male dormitory janitor also appear.) It could be a ballet where Clara doesn’t need to be saved, but where her journey is one of empowerment.
Most Nutcrackers lean heavily on senior dancers. Hardy’s version – out of necessity, rather than philosophy – became a production led by kids and teenagers. It was new. It was bold. It allowed young dancers to carry the story.
A year passed before Hardy’s vision touched a studio floor, but the time and labour were worth it. Thirty-three years later, the Halifax Nutcracker has become its own tradition at Christmas, not just for recurring audiences but for young dancers.
“An artistic genius”
Friday night is the first rehearsal time of every busy weekend. Inside Halifax Dance Studio 2 you can see and hear and feel the energy. The girls are running on adrenaline and anticipation. They chat, giggle, and gossip over the sound of Adele’s Hometown Glory. Some dancers stretch on the floor, their bodies as flexible as Silly Putty. Others practice parts of their choreography, mimic the latest TikTok dance, or inspect themselves in the long line of mirrors.
They are buzzing with happiness.
For little girls who dreamed of being a ballerina – black leotard, pink tutu, hair in a tight bun – The Nutcracker is the dream. In Halifax, it is one of the few opportunities for young dancers to perform on a grand stage with a live orchestra. It’s a chance to live out the ballerina fantasy.
Hardy enters the room (after working in a separate studio with the dancer playing Clara). The moment the dancers see Hardy, they instantly fall into place. No one tells them to. Hardy’s presence is its own cue.
A former Hardy Nutcracker dancer, Molly Courish, performed in the ballet from ages 10-17. Now she’s 25 and has not danced since graduating from high school. She looks back on her time with Hardy with a mixture of respect and awe.
The way Hardy instructed her to move while dancing was new, a revolution, something she never would have thought of on her own.
Hardy’s way of giving instructions at the end of each act in rehearsal is clear. Once the girls have finished the dance, they are allowed two minutes for water before being given corrections. The corrections are specific and delivered without sugar-coating. Often, a dancer is asked to stand and repeat a movement in front of everyone. Hardy then corrects the mistake quickly. The girls don’t flinch when called out. In this studio, it’s just routine.
Tonight, she tells them, “Girls, your faces. You need to look like you’ve just had a wonderful facial. A dewy, glowy look.” It sounds crazy. How does one look dewy right there on the spot? But five minutes later, when they go to dance Act Two, they do. Their faces soften and become effortlessly luminous.
Hardy knows exactly what she wants. No breath is ever wasted. The dancers absorb her words, both out of an eagerness to please and respect.
During her notes, Hardy pauses. She decides, in a few words, to offer two lessons: discipline and empathy. “Ladies,” she says, “I hope one day you are trying to focus on something very important and the people around you won’t stop talking. Keep quiet. I’m being honest and blunt, but it’s not fair. People can’t focus.”
Asked if while dancing she was scared of Hardy, Courish hesitates. She always felt admiration, but says that when young rehearsals could be nerve-wracking. “As you get older and you get to know her better,” Courish says, one’s appreciation grows. Now, looking back, she sees Leica Hardy as an “artistic genius.”
The girls know that her lessons, including the criticism, are valuable. Ultimately, they are learning to be both better dancers and people.
On their way out the door after the rehearsal almost every girl stops, waves, and says thank you to Hardy. It is a sign of their esteem. Hardy gives a small, genuine wave back.
The price
Dance has been in Hardy’s life for as long as she’s been able to form memories.
She started with ballet at four and added jazz and modern dance as she grew. Growing up in Toronto, she started teaching dance part-time while still a student. Hardy discovered she could make money by passing on her love for movement.
Then came a scholarship to the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School, where she was able to sharpen her technique and deepen her understanding. After leaving Winnipeg in her early twenties, Hardy went back to Toronto and worked as an independent performer. She flirted with other careers, but always found a way back to dance. It wasn’t a choice so much as a gravitational pull. Dance made her happy.
At one point, she was invited to teach a summer program at Halifax Dance. That summer, she met the man who would become her husband. The job was supposed to be temporary, and she returned to Toronto that fall, but love eventually brought her to the East Coast for good. Years onstage and in the studio gave her the foundation she needed, and in 2002 she opened her own dance school in Dartmouth.
Having her own school gave Hardy the freedom to create her own syllabi and curricula, and to choose the right people to teach with her. It meant she could craft a philosophy that blended her classical ballet roots with her modern dance experience. A method which was both contemporary and holistic. And it worked.
All these years later, Hardy continues to nurture dancers.
But running a dance school (like any business) isn’t full of constant joy. It can be lonely. Teaching dance is a career that requires countless hours in a studio with people who aren’t at the same stage of life as you. This has made Hardy, who is 71, often feel isolated from other people her age. The cost of doing what she loves – bringing the beauty of dance to thousands – is, ironically, solitude. Hardy willingly pays this price because, in return, she is surrounded by youth and creativity.
She has also learned to relish the rare moments of collaboration, like The Nutcracker, which allows her to work with other creative minds. Prominent collaborations include creating Clara’s world with Graham Whitehead and teaching choreography alongside other teachers.
For the longest time, Hardy said she would retire by 70. Yet she’s still in a studio nearly every day. After the pandemic, she realized she wasn’t ready to give up something that continues to give her fuel. So Hardy keeps going.
She allows herself one night off a week – a small step towards an eventual life after full-time teaching – but will never be entirely done with dance. It is ingrained in who she is. Running a studio has its challenges, but when your livelihood is your passion it is all worthwhile.
The show goes on
On December 5 the curtain will rise at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium, and months of practice will come to life on the stage. Families, friends, and holiday-goers will settle into their seats.
Some will be first-timers, smiling when the dancing toy comes to life. Others know the show well enough to point out a girl and say, “She wasn’t in this last year.” In Halifax’s 33 years of Nutcracker performances, more than 200,000 people have watched Clara journey through her enchanting dreamworld.
Across two weekends the production will run nine times – sometimes twice in one day. Before every show, the backstage bustles with the ritual chaos of showtime ticking closer. Excited dancers will run around, thrilled not only to perform but to skip a bit of school. They decorate their shared dressing rooms, bonding over their mutual experience. Glittering costumes hang on racks, pink ballet slippers are tossed like petals on the floor, and red lipstick is scrawled on mirrors, spelling out words of encouragement. Bottles of hairspray and stage makeup sit atop cluttered vanities.
Molly Courish, her voice heavy with admiration and nostalgia, says, “It’s the best time ever.”
In the shadows, Leica Hardy’s work doesn’t end with opening night. She doesn’t get to sit back and admire the production she has put together year after year. She knows improvements can be made throughout the run, up until the final performance. During each show she sits at the back of the theatre, observing from the audience. Notebook in hand, she will be watching as closely as in rehearsal. Some dancers may have difficulty adjusting to the Rebecca Cohn stage. A dancer may be struggling to grasp a certain step. Hardy notes these things so she can help them before the next performance.
This is Hardy at her core – an artist whose leadership feels innate. An artistic director who has watched her adaptation of The Nutcracker for 33 years and never tired of it. She still strives for more.
Teaching students to move is her work, but watching them perform is the best pleasure. Hardy feels magic the moment a dancer’s face brings the story to life. A theatrical expression is her favourite part of a show because it connects with people. It makes them feel something. The general audience won’t notice when a step is slightly off, but they will notice the emotion rising in their chest as Clara wakes up from her dream. This is the invisible thread between dancer and spectator.
Next year, from September to December, the Halifax Dance studio will again fill with eager, young performers – some returning and others just beginning.
A world of dormitory girls and dancing puppets will again be born. And chances are that, sharing her decades of devotion and love for ballet, Leica Hardy will be in command.
About the author
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Photo of Leica Hardy by Anastasia Wiebe.
