Holiday live entertainment options abound this time of year in Southwest Michigan, but perhaps none so festive and crisp as the Canadian Brass Christmas concert at Miller Auditorium in Kalamazoo, which kicked off the season mere days after Thanksgiving.

Christopher Wheeldon, the British-born Royal Ballet trained dancer and one of the world’s most innovative and celebrated choreographers, created a ballet based on An American in Paris, the iconic multiple Oscar-winning 1951 Vincente Minelli film starring Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron, in 2005 for New York City Ballet, but he had never before directed actors.

Between the two acts of Seeing/Seen, Wellspring/Cory Terry & Dancers’ Fall Concert of Dance, the audience is invited onto the stage to interact and make noise with drumsticks on the Singing Wall Sculptures, an enormous set of suspended gongs and other metalwork created by Lisa Renee Coons and Steven E. Pierce that is prettier to look at than to hear.

German conductor Hans von Bülow coined the famous snap judgment of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem Mass: “an opera, though in ecclesiastical robes.”