The Ballet cut three staff positions, immediately stopped advertising , and most dramatically, cancelled the remainder of its season in the huge and expensive Community Center Theatre. Then Cunningham did something really radical, he added performances… dozens of smaller ones at the Mondavi Center, McClatchy high, in art galleries and mostly in the Ballet’s home studios. The revamped season was a gamble. For the dancers, it was grueling.

One factor that weighed in favour of his remaining in Stuttgart was a wish to continue guest dancing in Europe. Reilly feared that the expense of bringing him over from Canada would discourage future engagements overseas. "The whole thing about leaving Europe – I thought I was ready, but I wasn't."

He looks forward to further opportunities to guest with the National Ballet, stating that his artistic director, Reid Anderson, "is very cool with me working here." Reilly declined to comment on his relationship with National Ballet first soloist Tina Pereira, whom he met when they performed Taming of the Shrew together.

All Pointes West begins with Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s Great Galloping Gottschalk, followed by the third act pas de deux from Marius Petipa’s Sleeping Beauty featuring the wedding pas de deux, and Dwight Rhoden’s Ave Maria. The program concludes with Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo.

The dances are: Kettentanz, Mobile, Cloven Kingdom, Round of Angels, and Carousel (A Dance). The Cleveland Orchestra will perform the ballet scores from the Blossom orchestra pit. These performances mark the first time since 1984 that the Orchestra will accompany a ballet performance from Blossom's orchestra pit. Cleveland Orchestra assistant conductor Tito Muñoz will lead the performances.

Molnar’s new work will be performed by Ballet BC dancers. The National’s dancers will perform the rest of the program: George Balanchine’s Apollo and a pas de deux from The Sleeping Beauty and Lady of the Camellias.

Molnar was hired as the company’s interim artistic director after John Alleyne’s contract wasn’t renewed when it expired at the end of June. Last November, during Alleyne’s 17th year as artistic director, the dance company’s financial troubles became public when it laid off all its dancers and office staff, and went into receivership.

Strongest were two male-female duets, Stefanie Nelson’s “Venn Duet (did she fall or was she pushed?)” and Rebecca Kelly’s “Desire (excerpt).” The “Venn Duet” began with Ofelia Loret de Mola lying in near-death stillness while Julian Barnett first addressed her in dance, then gradually stirred her to life and activity. Later they both went through a series of spasms (mainly upper-body). After that it was he who lay down and she who brought him back to life, whereupon he — not for the first time, but more so — grew clingy and possessive, prompting her to fend him off and assert her independence.

This little story would have had more force if most of it were not set to Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegal im Spiegal,” a composition so frequently used in choreography that it has become a dance cliché. A central section was set, by contrast, to the considerably less familiar “Muistatko Monrepos’n” by Anniki Tahti and Poutahaukat, in which a female vocalist sounded like a wobbly and half-asleep imitator of Lotte Lenya. As if this choice of music wasn’t already bizarre, it was then overlaid by a series of bangs and thumps. The body language exhibited by Mr. Barnett and Ms. Loret de Mola always seemed truthful as drama, but the movements, though they ranged considerably, seemed borrowed, as if conforming at each stage to a different (post-) modern-dance idea of male-female behavior.

After winning first place in the title division at three regional competitions earlier this year, Katie competed nationally at the Headliners competition in New Jersey.

There, she beat 11 competitors to win the title division, earning a trophy, crown and $500. She and five other dancers were also selected to be represented by McDonald Selznick Associates, a talent agency that represents choreographers and dancers.

Cohen's updated interpretation marks a dramatic, decidedly modern departure from most previous versions of Swan Lake. Both the royal court and the tutu-clad corps de ballet of swans that dominate ballet renditions are replaced by three female contemporary dancers (Reut Levi, Rita Komisarchik and Daniel Gal) who remain onstage the entire time. Whereas many productions of the dance stretch over four acts and last three hours - a structure typical of classical ballet - his work runs for an hour and 20 minutes, with one intermission. Yet despite differences in the technique, setting, characters and length, Cohen's Swan Lake retains significant links to the legendary Petipa and Ivanov version. Cohen cut some sections from Tchaikovsky's stirring orchestral score, but unlike many other contemporary choreographers, he did not manipulate the portions he retained. "I hope the result is very respectful to the music," he says, "because this is the most important thing in my eyes. The music is so brilliant and so strong and so full and so deep that you have to come with a lot of respect and modesty when you work with music such as that."

"We were busy doing the Merry Widow," recalls Iain MacDonald, then a principal dancer with the State Theatre Ballet, as the organisation was renamed after the scandal. "We were told on a Monday morning. Management decided we would do a farewell performance on the weekend. Once the curtains closed we were out on our own."

It has been a rough road for the company that has morphed into the South African Ballet Theatre (SABT). If not for the dedication of a small handful of people, SA's largest professional ballet company, which has attracted dancers from the Royal Danish Ballet, the Louisville Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada, would not exist today. And it is not a story of a company simply changing its name. When things fell apart, it was the dancers themselves who took on the task of rebuilding.