Fall for Dance is coming of age. Its sixth annual season opened strongly Tuesday night with the first of five sold-out programs (check the box office for returned tickets) promising top-notch dance for 10 bucks a ticket.

This year's edition even has a theme -- the centennial of The Ballets Russes -- and the program began with Nijinsky's "Afternoon of a Faun," danced by Boston Ballet.

Attila Mosolygo, Grand Rapids Ballet Company's ballet master, has the enviable task of reprising his dream role in George Balanchine's iconic "Prodigal Son" for the company's season opener Friday in the Peter Martin Wege Theatre. "Growing up, I always hoped I could perform it," he said of the title role. "To actually be able to do it is quite special, because it's such a difficult work. It is much more than just executing steps."

At least that’s the case with “Come Fly With Me,” Tharp’s dazzling new work set to the voice of Sinatra and performed in a blaze of passion and heat by an ensemble of thoroughbred dancers. Conceived, choreographed and directed by Tharp, the Alliance Theatre world premiere is backed by an onstage orchestra and dressed up in the visual eye-candy of some of Broadway’s best designers. There’s even a jazz vocalist (Dee Daniels) who croons about the lilting highs and low-down dirty blues of falling in love.

You might quibble with the choppy mood swings or familiar romantic themes of “Come Fly With Me,” a show with Broadway ambitions by the modern-dance maven who created the commercially successful Billy Joel homage “Movin’ Out.” Tharp’s Sinatra celebration — a series of vignettes about four couples who come together under the skylight of an opulent ballroom — isn’t entirely seamless and at times feels a bit random.

Ballet, in particular, requires "an incredible range of motion," Kelepecz continues. "Probably 10 percent of people have that range of motion naturally. Everybody else has to create it, and when you start to create that, that's when you create injuries." Most of the physical problems associated with ballet are relatively subtle and largely cumulative. Among them, Kelepecz says, are joint problems -- particularly knee and ankle problems -- rotator cuff and shoulder injuries, and head and neck strains.

But traumatic injuries also can occur. Christian recalls seeing, and hearing, a fellow dancer's anterior cruciate ligament -- one of the knee's key ligaments -- snap during rehearsal. "It's very loud," she says. "It sounds like a gunshot."

Selfridges, incredibly, is selling “mantyhose”. The idea is that they keep your legs warm. Personally I’ve always found that trousers achieve this quite successfully but as you can perhaps tell from the merrily haphazard stubble I sport in my byline photo I’m not a fashion expert.

A spokesman for Selfridges says that wearing “mantyhose” will help you make “a true style statement”. That statement presumably being, “Look at me, I’ve come dressed as a gay Prince Regent.”

Ballet British Columbia hasn’t had an easy go lately. After narrowly escaping bankruptcy at the start of the year, the organization went on to announce the departure of long-time artistic director John Alleyne and, shortly thereafter, interim executive director Andrew Wilhelm-Boyles. The company also revealed it would neither mount a full subscription season this year nor participate in the Cultural Olympiad. Throw in the way it was hit, along with every other arts organization, by the provincial-government cuts, and it was all enough to make you wonder whether the company would survive at all.

But interim artistic director Emily Molnar refuses to see Ballet B.C.’s recent struggles in anything other than a positive light.

When ballerina Jillian Vanstone is in Nanaimo next week she plans to more than simply thrill ballet fans with her work in the National Ballet of Canada's show at the Port Theatre on Monday night.

Vanstone is also returning to her roots to offer a workshop for the KYDC dancers (KYDC is a Kirkwood Dance Company that provides enrichment in many styles of dance, workshops, performances and volunteer performances in the community, etc.)

Emily Molnar, recently charged with reviving the fortunes of Ballet BC as its interim artistic director, has immersed herself – as the name of her work, a view is a view is a view, signposts – in the often exasperatingly lucid thought of modernist writer Gertrude Stein. Specifically, Molnar riffs off Stein's concept of the "continuous present," expressing it through a circularity of composition that also leaves room for what at times looks very much like spontaneous improvisation.

Bintley: I happened to reach this marvellous book by David Bodanis, E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation. The whole thing is really a history of the science behind the equation and how Einstein reached it. So it starts 2000 years ago and goes up to the present and beyond. What impressed me was that it was a whole history of man and a whole history of science behind this great discovery. There are so many facets to it - it’s not a dull old formula. It explains everything in the universe.

I wrote to Matthew and said, “Read this book, is there something here?” I said I want to do a piece on it, like a symphony, with each element of the equation featured. The first movement is Energy, the second Mass, the final movement is Speed of Light or c2, and there’s an interlude called The Manhattan Project, which was the atom bomb. The titles enough suggest movement to me - aside from that, there is in the background all of the reading that I’ve done over the past couple of years just to inform me as much as I can.

Written by Allison Burnett, the new "Fame" borrows heavily from the original in its structure. We meet its 10 main characters on audition day — noticing that a few cast members seem a little long in the tooth to be playing would-be high-school freshmen — as they demonstrate their talents and receive the first of many faculty lectures about Hard Work. Four years of high school unfold, culminating in a gala graduation performance that mysteriously involves dusty tribal drums and weirdly sped-up ballet. Presumably the kids are now ready to launch themselves into performing-arts careers, though I hope those drummers have a backup plan.

Following 10 characters over a period of four years in under two hours means, by necessity, that the stories are at best perfunctory and at worst nearly nonexistent. (The original, half an hour longer, did a better job of this.) Early on, we see a kid getting some grief from dance teacher Ms. Kraft (Bebe Neuwirth, whose gravel voice is always a pleasure); four years later, she tells him that he's not good enough to be a dancer. So, what happened in between? Nothing? It's hard to care about the kid when we barely know who he is.

One of Barbara Owsley's greatest passions was the Houston Ballet. At the time of her death, she had served on its board of trustees for more than 30 years, said Patsy Chapman, Houston Ballet's events director.

In 1978, Owsley was chairwoman for the Houston Ballet Ball, which was then the group's main fundraiser.

Now married and living in Melbourne, Cunxin, 48, works as a stockbroker and motivational speaker. He moved to Australia in 1995 and danced for the Australian Ballet until 1999, when he shifted to finance. He became a citizen in 2000. He still loves China and the US but, he says proudly: ''I call Australia home.''

The film's budget of $26 million is astronomical by local standards and came mostly from private investors who, inspired by Cunxin's talks, pledged support for any film about his journey.