The width of an average laptop computer screen is close to 12 inches. The Metropolitan Opera's stage is 57 feet wide. The difference is huge, but the people behind Classicaltv.com are betting $10 million that audiences won't mind downsizing their performing arts experience in exchange for the convenience of instant access.

"When I first introduced this work in 1993, there was a lot of opposition and protest. It was the first time in Russia to cover the secret life of the famous composer and because he was respected so much, it was prohibited to reveal his personal life," Eifman told reporters during a press conference last week in central Seoul.

"But I was curious. Curious of how the talented composer made such tragic works during his life. This is not a biographical story, but more about Tchaikovsky's mind and soul.''

[i]You wear toe shoes eight hours a day. Then what?

I like to wear heels. People always say to me, "Oh my gosh, how can you wear those? Aren't your feet killing you?" And I think, "Do they know what I do for a living? These are actually comfortable in comparison."

Onstage you wear lots of makeup. What about offstage?

I think natural is beautiful. I always focus on my eyes. Mascara is a definite. I can leave the house with just mascara on and feel OK.

Scènes de Ballet (1947), by Frederick Ashton, starts the evening in classy, modern style. The company, glamorous in pastel-tinted tutus and tights, are pretty trim. But as they run through the strict geometric, kaleidoscopic groupings with trilling feet and nodding heads, there is a slight sense of restraint in the performance, rather than the perfect precision required.

The dancers seem much more at home in William Forsythe's Workwithinwork (1998), a choreography (one of his last on pointe) of liquid complexity. Duets and trios bring emotional equality between male and female, allowing both to inhabit the movement with soulful intensity and plenty of elongated limb power. Moving in and out of darkened doorways upstage, and backed by Berio's Duetti for two violins, they emanate universal humanity, communicated through a piquant conversational elegance. Reflected against this 21st-century creation, Ashton's postwar boy/girl choreography is revealed as an illuminating foil and clever programming.

Workwithinwork shifts everything up several gears. A darkened stage. The women’s tops in jewel-coloured velvet, the men’s vests glinting with sparkles and movement that revels in steely precision, sudden switches of direction and tempi, mercurial skittishness – William Smith spins into action, though there are no slouches in this piece. As for Petrushka – not so dance-y as the other works, but a darkly vivid slice of 1990s Russian street life, full of character and underpinned by superb playing from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Nicholas Kok.

In contrast, choreographers from Russia and Sweden show Baryshnikov as a master storyteller. In Alexei Ratmansky's whimsical "Valse-Fantaisie," the story is about the creation of Mikhail Glinka's score: a tale of love lost but understanding eventually won. There are movement jokes juxtaposing traditional ballet-mime with streetwise gestures -- passages that showcase Baryshnikov's fabulous use of his hands. And there are plenty of high-velocity ballet steps that melt into nonchalance or switch into twisty modernism and call for absolute precision. They get it, brilliantly.

In the first half of the program, Baryshnikov makes fleeting appearances in an excerpt from Mats Ek's "Solo for Two," serving as a kind of phantom or memory as Ana Laguna traces a harrowing cycle of deep, wild grieving. At 54, Laguna is not only Ek's wife but the touchstone of his quirky, emotional movement style, which ricochets from swirling, poetic statements of overwhelming loss to sudden, all-too-human gestural oddities: wiping her nose, for example, or scratching her behind. Stockholm knows her unconventional artistry well, but some of us are just discovering it.

"There are 2,700 seats in that hall," Hesse said. "Now, I'm not delusional. We can't do that many, but we can sell 1,500 to 2,000, and that's where we're headed." The gala is designed to pay for itself, not put money in ICB's bank account.

On the artistic side, John Meehan, an Australian dancer-choreographer with extensive executive experience, said he has assembled the gala cast with both dancers and repertoire in mind. He wanted to make the program "more contemporary and neoclassical," he said. "Often, the emphasis in galas is on virtuosity and classical repertoire."