Woo has danced in her fair share of The Nutcracker performances, and she reveals to PEOPLE the one scene in the show that she refers to as "ballet on hard mode"
Each year when the holidays roll around, hundreds of ballet companies across the country dust off their candy canes and carefully unpack their nutcrackers from storage in preparation to meet the thousands of show-goers clamoring for tickets to watch a performance of the Christmas-time classic ballet, The Nutcracker.
It's a ballerina's job to make every turn, leap, variation and sequence look positively effortless, even when they aren't (which is usually).
This might be why so many people have such positive memories of watching The Nutcracker around the holidays. Year after year, dancers work to make each performance they put on as magical and nostalgic as the last.
However, while it might seem like the ballerinas on stage are sailing through the Land of Sweets or having a ball at the Stahlbaum family's Christmas Eve party, making the dances look as graceful as they do requires a lot of hard work.
And, according to Madeline Woo, who is a principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet, there's one scene in the show that is almost always made even harder for those participating in it.
Woo, who joined the San Francisco Ballet's company as a principal dancer back in July, tells PEOPLE that she's danced in her fair share of The Nutcracker productions while growing up and with different companies.
She says that there is one scene from the show that takes the cake -- or perhaps the sugar plum -- when it comes to difficulty level, though not necessarily because of the technical finesse required.
The San Francisco Ballet's production of The Nutcracker is particularly unique, as companies across the country have it to thank for starting the tradition of holiday Nutcracker performances in the United States. It was this company that first performed the original full-length U.S. production ofThe Nutcracker over 80 years ago.
During scene three of the first act of The Nutcracker, the show's protagonist, Clara, is fresh off of her defeat of the Mouse King, having saved the nutcracker-turned-prince from hordes of giant rodents. The prince takes her on an adventure into the Land of Snow, which is when the show's iconic "Waltz of the Snowflakes" occurs.
It's a beautiful scene that many companies -- including the San Francisco Ballet -- stage using copious amounts of faux snow falling from the stage's rafters to make it appear even more magical.
"It's like ballet on hard mode," Woo laughs, of dancing in the fake precipitation. "There's paper coming down, there's usually fog, so the floor is super slippery."
The snow in San Francisco's production is also reused from show to show, which Woo admits can make the pieces of paper a bit dirty.
And, it gets everywhere, she laughs, recounting a funny story from one of her dancer friends, who said she even saw a piece of the snow in her refrigerator one time.
"It stays in your clothes, you inhale it," she laughs. Woo doesn't even dance in the snow scene when she performs in The Nutcracker, really only coming on in the last portion of the show as grown Clara in the ballet's final pas de deux.
"Jasmine [Jimison] -- one of the other principals in the company -- was telling me that she inhaled [a piece of snow] at like the back of her throat and she was just like hacking the entire show," she says.
"People get stuck in like their eyes and their eyelashes," she goes on.
But, you'd never know, based on the way the dancers comport themselves. Plus, Woo says, "[the snow] just looks so pretty."
Apart from sitting at the top of the ranks in the company as one of the San Francisco Ballet's newest principal dancers, Woo has built up her own loyal following as a dancer online. On Instagram, she boasts nearly 370,000 followers and almost 220,000 on TikTok, and touts herself in her bio as "that ballerina with the tattoos."
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She's slightly edgy, as evidenced by her slew of body art and her dark, moody dance wear aesthetic, but says she loves pushing the boundaries of what ballerinas can do and look like.
"We don't have to fit inside the little dainty box," she says of dancers. "I feel like the world needs to see a bit more of that."
Plus, getting the tattoos (despite some initial regrets) spurred much of Woo's social media success, which in turn has led to her starting her own dancewear brand which launched on Thanksgiving.
"[Starting my brand] really helped my confidence... and it made me feel so much better even though my body didn't change at all," Woo, who has been open about her struggle with body image issues as a result of her dance training, shares. "I wanted to make this feeling and journey into something material that I could share with other people."
While part of the magic of The Nutcracker is that it often looks and feels the same to audiences year after year, Woo reveals that often, there are slight tweaks and changes made to choreography that suit the dancer who is performing each particular role.
She tells PEOPLE that one of the company's ballet masters, Tina LeBlanc, is the dancer that Helgi Tomasson originally choreographed the San Francisco Ballet's version of The Nutcracker's final pas de deux with in mind.
"It's like evolved over the years 'because Helgi is like constantly working on it and like, changing it based off of like whichever dancer that he's working with," she shares. "We have a bunch of options and we just kind of choose which one works the best for us."
The changes are subtle, like a turn here or a jump there, but they make a difference in highlighting each individual dancer's strengths.
However, working alongside a ballet master who performed in the original staging of the show's current choreography can be interesting.
"She's like, 'This is what I did,' " Woo laughs of working with LeBlanc.
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