It has been almost 3 1/2 years since the Kansas City Ballet decided on the Union Station Power House as the site of its new Todd Bolender Center for Dance and Creativity. Now the organization is ready to start transforming the dilapidated historic structure, at 400 W. Pershing Road, into an airy work and performance space.

When the $31 million renovation is completed in July 2011, “it will be one of the best dance buildings in the country,” said Jeffrey J. Bentley, the Ballet’s executive director.

He has been hard at work for hours. First class, then rehearsal, then more rehearsal. This day, six hours of dancing at the Boston Ballet School in the city's South End.

Akiba: “Uh. It can be ridiculous sometimes. You go home and you're wasted. Your muscles hurt and your calves are cramping.”

20-year-old Akiba stands 5 foot 7, not even 140 pounds. With his ruddy face and hesitant voice -- he has more the demeanor of a shy teenager than a tenacious dancer.

The company dedicated Thursday night's performance to Shapiro.

"We had a very sad week this week. We lost one of our dancers in an automobile accident," Artistic Director Robert Weiss told the audience on stage before the performance. "They've rallied together in their grief, comforting each other. The ballet company's like a family anyway. I think we've become a much closer family after this last week."

Female athletes who don't eat enough to make up for the energy they expend during long workouts, may stop getting their period as a consequence, Hoch explained. These two components of the female athlete tetrad put them at higher risk for the other two -- cardiovascular problems and bone density deficits -- often seen in much older, postmenopausal women, she noted.

At the American College of Sports Medicine meeting in Seattle last week, Hoch reported on a study of 22 professional ballerinas from the Milwaukee Ballet Company. Their average age was 23 and their average weight was 114 pounds.

During intermission, the Asheville bluegrass band Greasy Beans sets up at the foot of the stage, and its fiddle takes the place of Pärt's violin. After the players warm up with a few numbers, they propel NCDT into Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux's “Shindig.”

Bonnefoux's blend of ballet and kicking-up-heels Americana keeps the dancers as busy as a banjo player's digits. Flirtatious women tease the men. Five men show off their leaping, twirling vitality. Through all of it, the company combines down-home spirit with a precision and airiness that would be right at home in “Swan Lake.” So much for being the “other” athletes.

While superficial logic would encourage the viewer to dismiss Manon as a wicked, fickle woman caught up in her desire for fortune, MacMillan uses his excellent skills as a choreographer to give the play's namesake a chance for redemption. Principal Amy Fote dances the title role, a part that demands tremendous depth and maturity, and succeeds in making the character sympathetic.

The Colorado Ballet is doing a four-city tour of a show called “All Pointes West” with funding help from the Colorado Masterpieces Award, which is funded by the Colorado Council on the Arts.

The mission of the Colorado Ballet's education departments to make dance accessible to everyone, to promote dance and movement as part of a healthy lifestyle and to encourage creativity and expression through movement.

Fashion isn't the only art form having an '80s moment. Houston Ballet's Without Boundaries program, opening Thursday, offers three pieces about crossing that sweaty divide between classical ballet and modern dance — a genre that reached a pinnacle in the 1970s and '80s.

OK, so the line was first breached in about 1912, when Vaslav Nijinsky and his sister, Branislava Nijinska, began pushing the envelope for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. But they were classically trained ballet dancers. Not until decades later did someone with modern roots successfully make the leap the other way.