At John Cain Photography, our mornings start a little differently than most. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, our team gathers over coffee for what we call “lineup,” a few minutes to reset, remind each other of our standards, and ground ourselves in why we do this work before the day gets moving. We close each session the same way: Any wins to celebrate? What’s hot or urgent? What do you need help with? Who’s in the studio today?
Here’s one of those readings, as it was actually delivered to our team:
Steph inspired me this week with William and Lorelai auditioning for The Nutcracker – I trained classically growing up, and one of the things I learned pretty quickly is that being a dancer requires so much more than learning choreography. There is an entire world of knowledge that comes with it—the history, the discipline, the physical and mental endurance, and the relentless dedication to strive for perfection.
Which, spoiler alert, is impossible in ballet.
Dance is such a powerful mover of the mind, body, and spirit. It connects you to something greater than yourself, while simultaneously connecting you to the people who came before you. You are learning movements, traditions, and stories that have been passed down through generations—and then you’re adding your own interpretation to them.
And a huge part of that transformation is the music.
Composers spend years, sometimes their entire lives, trying to capture something that is incredibly difficult to put into words: emotion. Human connection. Longing. Joy. Grief. Anticipation.
They take something intangible and give it a language. And then the dancer takes that language and gives it a body.
On its own, dance is beautiful. It can be freeing for the person performing it and moving for the person watching it. But pair that movement with an intentional, emotionally powerful score, and suddenly it becomes something much larger than either one could create alone.
Which brings me to my question for today:
When you think of the three most famous ballets in the world, what comes to mind?
The Nutcracker. Swan Lake. The Sleeping Beauty.
And what do all three have in common? Tchaikovsky.
Tchaikovsky is arguably one of the most influential composers in the history of ballet, and what he did was fundamentally change the relationship between music and dance.
The traditional idea was essentially:
The dancer moves. The orchestra accompanies.
Tchaikovsky moved that toward something much more powerful:
The music establishes the emotion. The dance embodies it.
The orchestra wasn’t simply providing something for the dancers to move to anymore. The music became part of the storytelling itself.
It could introduce a character. Build anticipation. Create tension. Make us feel heartbreak before we even understood why. It could tell us what was happening beneath the surface while the dancers showed us what was happening on it.
And I think that’s where this becomes really interesting for us.
Tchaikovsky didn’t just become excellent at writing music.He changed what people believed that music could do.
He understood that the thing he was creating had the potential to outlive the moment it was created for. A piece written for a particular ballet, particular dancers, and particular audience could eventually become something generations of people would experience, interpret, perform, and pass down.
He wasn’t just creating something for the moment. He was creating something that could become part of a legacy.
And that is where I kept going back and forth between two of our values for this week: Excellence and Heritage.
Because Tchaikovsky’s work is undeniably extraordinary—but its true impact is also measured by what came after it.
His work didn’t just exist. It endured, and it paved the way for a more modern ballet.
So this week, we’re going to look at three of his greatest works—Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker—and use each one to explore a different piece of what we do here.
Because there is a really beautiful parallel between what Tchaikovsky gave to ballet and what we are entrusted to give to our clients:
The opportunity to create something that is bigger than the moment itself.
Something intentional. Something meaningful. Something that can move someone today—and still mean something to someone years from now.
