Get your kicks

When I was 11 or so, my stepmom took my sisters and me to see the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall. Of course, anyone familiar with the Christmas Spectacular knows that this really means seeing the Rockettes, those precise dancing beauties who hearken back to an era when show dancing was more about high kicks than bumps and grinds. Even from where we sat -- way in the back -- they looked all leg, one long strand of spangle, glitter and gleam, smiling and high-stepping in unison.

Then, the Christmas Spectacular was a distinctly Christmastime-in-New York experience, along with smudging up the windows along Fifth Avenue, drooling over toys at FAO Schwartz, and having afternoon tea with my mom at the Helmsley Palace Hotel.

But this year, those of us who can't and/or don't want to make it to New York anytime soon can now catch a little of that city's mythical holiday glitz in Winston-Salem. The Rockettes have taken their show on the road, traveling to 36 cities in the United States and Canada during most of November and December.

This year's traveling show has two components: an arena tour that will be stopping in Winston-Salem this weekend, and a theater tour that stays longer in larger cities such as Pittsburgh, Dallas and Nashville. Winston-Salem's shows will be the Rockettes' only stop in North Carolina.

Carolina connections

Katie Walker, 23, of Elon, and Jessica Pack, 30, of Spartanburg, S.C., are two Southerners who have joined the Rockettes' ranks. To see them, you will have to go to New York -- both have been cast in the show at Radio City this year -- but they came through town this fall to talk all things leggy.

This is Walker's second year performing in the Christmas Spectacular, and Pack's eighth.

Walker went to UNCSA for high school, studying ballet and graduating in 2004. While she was there, she danced across the Stevens Center stage in another Christmas classic, The Nutcracker.

Rockettes seem to have known about Rockettes from an early age. Walker remembers going on a backstage tour of Radio City and meeting a Rockette when she was 10. Pack's dance teacher growing up was a Rockette. "I grew up seeing her pictures all over the dance studio. She was inspiring to me. And taught us, even as little, kids, to stay in our lines … things that Rockettes have to do because we're a precision-dance group."

Pack saw the Rockettes when they were on the road in Myrtle Beach, and then when she moved to New York after college, she bought a ticket to the Christmas show. "I definitely remember watching from the nosebleed section, and being like, ‘I want to do that,'" she said.

Skill set

To call yourself a Rockette, you have to survive a two-day audition process, competing against hundreds of other female dancers in tap and jazz numbers and kick lines -- and you have to re-audition every year, so there's little job security. You have to be a good listener, able to pick up details quickly and precisely. (Red lips, long lashes, big eyes and hair pulled back in tidy French twists also seem to come with the territory.)

"You have to have strong ballet technique, but on top of that there's tap moves and jazz moves. It's unique because it's its own style," Pack said. "It sounds like it might be artistically stifling. It's almost freeing. You're working together in that large group. I'm expected to do this thing, and it makes this beautiful product, and that's what I like being a part of."

"It's breathtaking, that there are 36 girls who are doing the same thing," Walker said. (You'll see a line of 18 dancers at the Winston-Salem show, which is somewhat scaled back -- this show won't include the live camels and the like parading across stage in the Christmas Spectacular's famous "Living Nativity.")

Take those trademark kick lines. The Rockettes may look as if they are kicking as high as they can, as high as any human should be able to -- but they're not. Ballerinas would go higher still, but in order to keep things tight and precise, the Rockette kick is what Walker calls "eye high. From the tip of the toe to top of the eye."

"In other forms of dance, you're taught to kick fast and come down slow," Pack said. "But for us, it's like, kick-foot-down, kick-foot-down, because we're kicking so quickly. It's working your hamstrings in ways that you never thought your hamstrings would work."

Before New York

The Rockettes may seem like living icons of New York, but they were born in the more sober Midwest. In 1925, Russell Markert founded the "Missouri Rockets" in St. Louis, Mo. He was inspired by the Tiller Girls, a group that performed with the Ziegfeld Follies. The Rockets were brought to New York by Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel, who later founded Radio City Music Hall. The Rockettes performed there on opening night in 1932. The first Christmas Spectacular was performed in 1933.

Today, the Christmas Spectacular includes long-standing classics -- such as the austere, impeccably exact "The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers," -- and new numbers such as "Christmas in New York" (mimicking the experience of a double-decker bus tour through New York) and "Let Christmas Shine," the finale number adorned with Rockettes dripping in crystals, kicking their way around the stage like Vegas showgirls, though minus the plumage and with better moves. "It's very flashy and glitzy," Pack said. "It's one of my favorite numbers."

"There's so much to look at," she added. "It's like Christmas exploded."

And, you don't have to go to New York to see that.