Uliana Lopatkina, the reigning queen at the Mariinsky Ballet, gave not one but two performances like that last week, in Swan Lake and the company's Homage to Balanchine. Her excellence is partly a matter of academic rigour, partly of interpretation. Luckily, though, you don't need esoteric knowledge to enjoy it. Children who don't know their pliés from their piqués love ballet, as well as aesthetes, because when a dancer is in symbiosis with the music, anyone can see it.

There are several ways of looking at the Mariinsky Ballet's Homage to Balanchine, none of them entirely flattering. First it could be considered as a demolition job – not one executed with a wrecking ball, but a Fred Dibnah-style deconstruction that, almost lovingly, reduces something grand and venerable to so much rubble by compromising a few key bricks.

The modern dance company, rooted in the ballet tradition, was the festival's sole company to perform a work by the late Poll, founding artistic director of the former Ohio Ballet. The mournfully beautiful Elegiac Song, a restaging of Poll's first work in Akron, was one of the high points of the evening.

As the new artistic director, Paul Morales’ advantage is having a well-rounded background in the arts.

Pushing 40 and still impossibly boyish-looking, he became co-founder and artistic director of Dulaang Talyer and subsequently Airdance, known for their experimental works. Morales ventured into independent filmmaking and has gotten the nod from his peers. “I’ve always wanted to go beyond the stage,” he says. “For me, choreography, theater, film, directing and writing are connected.”