And, I need hardly add, "here's the trick" - dancers as observed in rehearsal. And, this being the other and even deadlier trick, Brandstrup and everyone involved treating the event au grand sérieux . Au plus grand sérieux .

What might have been a clever study about dancers preparing their work, their roles and their stage personae becomes portentous, murky. The artists arrive. They do un-intriguing things, take rests, react intermittently to each other. The ladder is climbed. Tamara Rojo sits, broods, dances as we might expect, is involved in a twitchy relationship with Whitehead, who uses his blouson-top as indication of his domineering personality: it is left about the stage and, until she rebels, Rojo is cloakroom attendant.

Brandstrup's characters are clearly learning a dance from video, watching in a huddle, sketching out moves with their hands. I like the way he shows their attentiveness, the nodding heads and thinking-aloud gestures as they sort out steps before performing them.

Moving into full performance, Brandstrup's dancers dip and wind, slither through their partnering. The line between rehearsal and performance gets blurred, with prepared moves sliding into duets. The choreography is all fluid, drifting moves. It's fluent, but short on bite and contrast.

“When we started we wanted to do a very modest, small-scale production of The Nutcracker, which in the early years was staged in West Island high schools,” the Beaconsfield resident recalled, adding a core group of parent volunteers were instrumental in making it happen.

The troupe went on to mount adaptations from the repertoire of Coppelia and Sleeping Beauty, and in the early 1990s moved its popular annual performances of The Nutcracker to the Pierre Peladeau Centre, “which was a big, scary jump; it’s been our home theatre ever since,” Mehuys said.

The night began with a ceremony honoring Arlene Shuler, the president and chief executive of City Center, in general, and Fall for Dance in particular, with the 58th annual Capezio Dance Award. The introductory citation, delivered by Anthony Giacoio, the president of the Capezio Foundation, mentioned the imagination with which Ms. Shuler has programmed Fall for Dance; Edward Villella, artistic director of Miami City Ballet, said (from recent experience) how a season at City Center is among the highlights of a dance company’s history. Mr. Villella, whose fame as a dancer (not least at City Center) is not forgotten, even though he retired from dancing in the late 1970s, was eagerly greeted by the audience. Ms. Schuler even more so.

I tend to think of Fall for Dance as a festival that honors the diversity of today’s dance scene. This year it has also emerged as the most historically conscious of New York’s dance institutions onstage. Although the centenary of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes has been honored in other American cities as far afield as Salt Lake City, New York’s home companies have ignored it.

Pacific Northwest Ballet Artistic Director Peter Boal and principal dancer Carla Korbes discuss the upcoming production of Romeo et Juliette, which debuts this weekend, as well as the upcoming season for the world-famous ballet company.

Musicality is a key feature of Ratmansky's work. He is adventurous in his choices and constantly on the prowl for scores that spark his imagination, a recent find being On the Dnieper, composed by Sergei Prokofiev in 1931 but recorded only in the 1990s. Written soon after The Prodigal Son and a few years before Romeo and Juliet, it contains echoes of both, though it lacks the marked "danciness" and sharp mood swings of Prodigal and the lyrical sweep of Romeo. It is beautiful and stirring but also, as Ratmansky points out, a bit puzzling. In the ABT studios in May, he was still trying to unlock its secrets through his characterization of the central figure of Sergei, as interpreted by ABT dancer Marcelo Gomes: "The main idea is a man comes back to the place where he used to live but hasn't been for a long time, and he starts to find a way to establish his identity within this place. He is in the center." This reading of the plot was not necessarily a feature of the original choreography--of which almost nothing is known--but it is the story the music was telling him.

Ratmansky no longer dances onstage; he has said it is difficult for him to look in the mirror, even though his 41-year-old body is hardly unfit. Yet his choreography seems to spring as much from his intensive analysis of scores and libretti as from his body and his particular way of moving. In the morning, before heading to the studio, he listens to the passage of music he will be focusing on that day, working out steps in his head. ("In Denmark," he told the New York Times last year, "I would put on some music and then switch on a camera and film myself. I wanted to see what my body would tell me because it's smarter. It responds to music almost spontaneously.") A while later, he strides energetically into the studio with an intense expression, as if already seeing the movement in his mind's eye, and immediately gets to work. Not a minute is wasted.