The 20th annual production of the Montecito School of Ballet’s two holiday ballets, The Night Before Christmas and Les Patineurs (The Skaters) will add nine young male dancers to the mix, giving quite a different edge to the production. Joining the dancers from the Montecito School of Ballet will be dancers from the community, UCSB and SBCC.

The double bill will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Friday and 2 p.m. Sunday in the Lobero Theatre, 33 E. Canon Perdido St. in Santa Barbara.

There is no choreographer listed for the ballet The Night Before Christmas, which was inspired by one of the best-known poems in the English language. Although the name of the author, Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863), is scarcely a household word, practically every line in his 1822 poem, originally called A Visit from St. Nicholas, has become a holiday figure of speech and part of our shared Christmas language.

Moore, who was a New York blue blood, wrote it for his family, and did not intend to have it published. During the following year, Moore’s children chattered excitedly about the poem to a family friend, Miss Harriet Butler, who obtained a copy and had it published, anonymously, the following December. It took off like wildfire, of course, and was reprinted exponentially across the country, though Moore did not acknowledge authorship until 1844.

During the ballet, the poem will be read aloud. The narrative structure of the ballet begins at a lavish Victorian party: The guests leave, the family goes to bed and the inanimate objects of the house come to life.

Les Patineurs (The Skaters) is a somewhat abstract ballet, based on the ability of dancers to suggest ice skaters. It was choreographed in 1937 by Frederick Ashton for the Royal Ballet of England, to music by Giacomo Meyerbeer, arranged by the great and sadly neglected English composer and writer Constant Lambert. (Lambert’s friend and mentor, Dutch-English composer and writer Bernard van Dieren, who died in 1936, was an eloquent champion of Meyerbeer and was probably the source of Lambert’s use of Meyerbeer for the ballet.)

Ashton’s choreography was the inspiration for this new production, which was choreographed by Carla Moseley and Delila Moseley.

Tickets to these ballets are $21 for adults, $17 for students and seniors, and $13 for children age 12 or younger; and are available from the Lobero box office at 805.963.0761. Click here to order online.

— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor.