"No performance is a perfect performance but some performances allow for the feeling of perfection. Achieving this moment of ecstasy easily validates all the pain and struggle of the art form by taking us, and possibly our audience, for a moment to a world beyond our own."
Elizabeth Ousley applies make-up before her performance in the Carolina Ballet’s production of the Nutcracker in Raleigh’s Progress Energy Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday Dec 22, 2012. CASEY TOTH