Bishop Street Ballet’s The Nightmare Before Nutcracker is a Literal Fever Dream Come to Life

When Maddie Hill talks about her motorcycle wreck, she doesn’t dramatize it. “I don’t remember anything past Fort Worth, really,” she says bluntly. “Thank God.” The impact crushed her face, shattered her knees and wiped the last stretch of her ride clean out of her memory. Two days earlier, she’d been cast as the Sugar Plum Fairy in her first professional Nutcracker — “the top tip top of a ballet career,” as she puts it. 

Many dancers would have walked away from the art, but Hill planned to get back on her feet and pirouette again. 

“I didn’t have time to feel bad for myself or sit around and cry about it,” she says. “I just had to saddle up and do what I had to do to get back to dancing.” 

While she recovered — bedridden, barely able to move — something else started forming.

“When I was in bed, and I couldn’t do anything, I just had… a dream,” Hill tells us. “Maybe something was on TV or something.” Images from the snow-coded The Nutcracker blended with the darker aesthetic of The Nightmare Before Christmas. “I just started piecing it together… piece by piece,” she says. “I’m like, ‘that goes together perfectly.’” 

That singular fever dream became the blueprint for Bishop Street Ballet’s signature production: The Nightmare Before Nutcracker, which shows at the Texas Theatre on Saturday.

Long before the accident, Maddie’s path followed a traditional, albeit impressive, ballet track. She trained at the Kirov Academy in Washington, D.C., which she describes as feeling “a little bit like ballet jail,” where students bowed to teachers in the hallway while her friends back home were going to prom. Once back in Texas, she continued dancing with Ballet Academy of Texas, SMU Dance, Dallas NeoClassical Ballet (DNCB) and Ballet North Texas. 

But while Hill was rebuilding her body, the Dallas ballet ecosystem was cracking. DNCB dissolved when its director left the state, and Ballet North Texas cut its roster during the COVID-19 pandemic. Floors, costumes and entire companies were disappearing. 

Maddie, along with a few colleagues, then decided to build something new from the pieces. Bishop Street Ballet was officially formed in 2021. It wasn’t designed as a hierarchy or a prestige machine, but pulled together out of a desire for something that didn’t exist – closer to a DIY band than a conventional dance company. A small, collaborative and tight-knit group defined by the people in it rather than the institution around it. 

She’d met Cameron Mills, her collaborator and long-term partner, at SMU. Mills was a craftsman and theatre student, and by the time Hill was recovering from the wreck, the two had realised they weren’t just partners in life but would soon jump together into whatever this fever dream idea would bring. The company grew in a way that indie groups often do: through rehearsals in borrowed spaces, late-night costume designing and dancers returning from disbanded companies seeking a new home. 

The storied Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff became the sun to their artistic Milky Way. The space – a century-old cinema known for its appreciation of cult movies, hyper-locality, and a lobby that smells like popcorn and Shiner Bock – fit the energy that Bishop Street Ballet was trying to cultivate. 

The missing piece for The Nightmare Before Nutcracker materialized when Maddie and Cameron went to see a storied event in Texas Theatre’s yearly programming: a Nosferatu screening with the band The Invincible Czars performing their own score live. Afterwards, at the merch table, the couple noticed a copy of the band’s 2007 Nutcracker Suite Album. It was Kismet. Their dream of The Nightmare Before Nutcracker took a step closer from hospital bed fever dream to fully realized ballet on the main stage.  

“They saw that, and I think they recognized us as kindred spirits — lovers of both horror/spooky stuff and the holidays,” Josh Robins of The Invincible Czars told us. “They asked if we’d like to join them for their usual show, performing the music live, and we were excited. It’s been a long time since we played the Nutcracker tunes… It’s been really fun to bring it back in this way with Bishop Street Ballet.” 

If the Bishop Street Ballet’s task was to blend the visual and storytelling elements of The Nutcracker and Nightmare Before Christmas, it was The Czars’ task to blend the music of Tchaikovsky and Elfman for this new take on old stories. This cohesion created a golden thread through what otherwise would be seen as two disparate works.  

Bishop Street Ballet has since grown into a 501(c)(3) with The Nightmare Before Nutcracker being the company’s crown jewel. Hill designs nearly every costume herself. Rehearsals are built around performers’ work schedules. Dancers come from traditional backgrounds but buy into the company’s ethos: ballet without the elitism, performance without pretension. 

Future projects include The Gilded Bat, an adaptation of the Edward Gorey book Hill is choreographing scene by scene. Plans are in place for further collaborations with local musicians and a push to bring ballet to unconventional venues as well. 

An idea that started on asphalt, scarred with pain, fear, and a blackout, has become something distinctly Dallas: offbeat and stitched together with the kind of stubbornness the city rewards. 

The Nightmare Before Nutcracker will be performed Dec. 6 at the Texas Theatre followed by a screening of The Nightmare Before Christmas.