Years ago, Mikhail Fokine’s Les Sylphides, the survivor of that 1909 season, was a staple of both their repertoires, but the centenary revivals — the Royal’s last Monday, ENB’s next month — come after a long gap.

Everyone, at some time, has played that game of imagining their lives in another era. No one ever chooses 1909 because of what came next, but it would have been great to have caught the buzz that greeted the Ballets Russes.

One hundred years on, almost to the day, it's hard to grasp its impact, first in Paris, then in London, then in almost every major city in Europe. This wasn't just an entertainment phenomenon. It was a tsunami of fashion, celebrity, art, music, design, exoticism and eroticism that burst through the floodgates of dour respectability to colour every aspect of civilised life. Just as the Sixties didn't really start swinging until 1967, the 20th century began in 1909.

During this week's "Innovations" programs, Ballet West dancers will perform a new work created for them by New York choreographer Nicolo Fonte.

Fonte came to Utah with cello music by Phillip Glass as his dance score and the basic structure for "The Immeasurable Cadences Within" in his head. But under his direction, each of the 12 dancers in the new ballet made contributions to the finished product.

We are cursed with George Balanchine, cursed with an overload of his ballets as well as with the ubiquity of the sinewy style he favored, his preference for plotless works on a naked stage, his taste for fast, skinny, emotionally guarded dancers.

Following an unprecedented year in terms of expanse, Nashville Ballet turns itself inside out for the newly announced 2009-2010 season. In addition to presenting a studio-based series of performances, the company will mount a new production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream; a Balanchine piece set to the music of Gershwin; and more.

The program opened with a commissioned work that debuted in December 2007, Celtic Book of Days, featuring music created and performed by Maryland resident Maggie Sansone with three musicians. Another local artist, Rob Levit joined BTM artistic director Dianna Cuatto to present the modern abstract Anatomy of Light, using his paintings and original music set to Cuatto's strong choreography. Act II of Swan Lake allowed Cuatto to honor mentor William Christensen of Ballet West, who staged the first American Swan Lake in 1940.

I had expected to find Fokine’s 1910 “Firebird” dated, seeing it just three days after Balanchine’s 1949 version at New York City Ballet. Actually it’s the more vivid of the two. Fokine brilliantly brings to life the uncut original score. And this is one ballet that Ms. Mason (who was coached as the Firebird by Margot Fonteyn, who had herself been coached by Karsavina, the original Firebird of 1910) has helped keep amazingly alive.

Mara Galeazzi, an often strained dancer, was at her best on Monday as the Firebird. On Friday, Leanne Benjamin was superlative, never allowing the drama of the long, exhausting opening pas de deux to relax for an instant. Now in her mid-40s, Ms. Benjamin is a completely compelling artist dancing with the technique to be expected of someone half her age.

Graceland, Rubies, Pas De Deux, Giselle, Javelin and Bolero were all part of the “Greatest Ballet Hits,” presented by the Cincinnati Ballet Friday, May 8.

Victoria Morgan, artistic director and CEO of the Cincinnati Ballet, wearing a ravishing turquoise dress, opened the performance saying, “You are all in for a sparkling evening, not just because you will be seeing Rubies … but also to showcase our 45 years of celebration … not only are we celebrating individuals but also celebrating a repertoire.” She was right. The dances hailed from all over the globe. The styles went from organic to sexy to light and finally to a classical presentation.

She had always intended to have a family before she stopped dancing, and is now the mother of two sons, ages 6 and 11. She returned with renewed commitment after each maternity leave. “She looked better than ever” after becoming a mother, former SFB principal Gonzalo Garcia noted during one of many appreciative video interviews shown Saturday, crediting LeBlanc’s “guts, discipline and passion.”

Garcia (now with New York City Ballet) partnered LeBlanc in many ballets and returned Saturday to share the stage with her one final time in a sparkling, exhilarating “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux.” It was he who knelt with such heartfelt affection during the bows as one of the many colleagues — past and present — who came onstage, offering a flower and a warm embrace. Her two sons, elegant in suits, joined the throng, and the celebratory stage picture – like the career – was complete.

The 60-year-old American comes from a traditional ballet background, training in New York and then dancing with the Joffrey and Stuggart companies. In 1984, after a spell as choreographer in Stuggart, he became director of Ballet Frankfurt where, over 20 years, he created works that propelled ballet into a new age.

These pieces took the basics of classical choreography and wrenched them into thrillingly modern, highly articulated new shapes. Balances were skewed, pelvises tilted, pointe shoes extended into outer space. Such brutal post-modernism seemed shocking at the time, but now works such as The Vertiginious Thrill of Exactitude and In the Middle Somewhat Elevated are prized possessions in the repertories of the world’s biggest ballet companies, the Royal, Paris Opera Ballet and the Mariinsky among them.

The program, and indeed, possibly this season and several to come, was dominated by Janie Taylor's haunted and haunting performance as the doomed heroine in Balanchine's surrealistic "La Valse". This was beyond dancing, almost beyond theater--the stage seemed to disappear as the audience itself was absorbed, with the other dancers on the stage, in watching, in awe and horror, this young girl's absolute willed self-destruction. There was nothing sympathetic or soft about her performance, it was almost triumphant in its destructive power, in its display of a will so in control that it could preside over its own demise. Though Taylor's unearthly pallor and her mass of golden hair help to create a creature not quite of this world, her performance was more than physical. Every nuance, from the odd, almost mime with her partner, to the first fear that she felt when she realized that Death was going to seduce her, to her final fervent determined greed to experience all that life and death could give her, resonated in her every gesture.

I am not entirely happy about the title "Zugvögel". It starts one hour before the proper stage performance begins, with an invitation to the audience, to join the group wandering about the cave of the under-stage, the 'belly' of the theatre, the machinery room, the shafts and the niches, inhabited by the now dead creatures who formerly worked there, birds, monsters, ogres and other living stock – now banished to the underworld, reminding me sort of the damned souls in Dante´s inferno of his "Divina commedia". Wandering around we face the lights again when we arrive at the proper stage, with the house slowly filled with the arriving visitors, with with projections of thousands of flattering seagulls, dangerously threatening the audience to any monment attacking them Hitchcock-like. The dancers now occupy the stage, and we may have landed in Dante's purgatory. There happens a lot of dancing in Kylián's accustomed energetic and aggressive style, propelling the bodies in diagonal slashes, bulding up twisted sculptures, sometimes looking rather weird, that in beautiful symmetries...