Robert Watkins, artistic director of the Concert Ballet of Virginia since 1976, attended a performance of Ballets Russes at The Mosque, now the Landmark Theater, in the late 1930s. During its first three seasons, the Richmond-based concert ballet performed dances as they were produced by Diaghilev. "We decided it was time to do it again, especially when we realized we were at the 100th anniversary of the ballet coming to Paris," Watkins said.

The program will open with "Les Sylphides," known as Chopiniana in Russia. The dance, choreographed by Michel Fokine, is set to music by Frédéric Chopin.

The dance organization would like to find a space it can share with at least one other entity - be it a performing arts group, a school or even a business. In Buehler's mind, a good pas de deux partner for the ballet might be a group that wants to share a music library, ticketing services and studio space.

The ballet is not looking to merge artistically with any group and is not planning to leave its performance homes: the Marcus Center's Uihlein Hall for most concerts and the Pabst Theater.

Hanna, a former principal dancer for the New York City Ballet, will rejoin the company as a guest artist for the upcoming season, according to The New York Times. A Billy Elliot spokesperson said Hanna's final performance date and replacement will be announced shortly.

The festival producers, however, didn’t even mine the Russes-related repertory of City Center’s own resident companies. Rather than Christopher Wheeldon’s engrossing Pulcinella, in which the dancers’ hips and ankles convey as much harlequin sauciness and wile as their shoulders and arms, we got Lightfoot León’s ghoulish Softly as I Leave You as our Morphoses provision. In place of Paul Taylor’s Rite of Spring, a comic-book noir take on the Nijinsky ballet that retains the original’s horror and sadness, we were treated to his cotton-candy Offenbach Overtures, a spoof of that other Paris, of Napoleon and dancehall dames. The drag queens of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo were funny and delectable in the Balanchine spoof Go for Barocco – but imagine if the looming Katerina Bychkova had gone toe-to-toe with Diana Vishneva in The Dying Swan!

Still, the bits of Ballets Russes we were privy to irradiated out to touch every work susceptible to their influence. Everything missing from Boston Ballet’s stultifying reconstruction of Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun, for example, showed up that night in Ohad Naharin’s B/olero: voluptuousness, unleashed in jagged riffs; frieze-like flatness, in the two dancers’ window-wiper arms; and even that Cubist habit of pointing out that it’s running nature through the heartless mill of artifice.

It sounds daunting, but Molnar doesn't let it show. “I think that to the outside eye, it is a challenging position that we're in. But it's also incredibly exciting because there's a newness about what we're doing that doesn't happen all the time,” Molnar said during a break from rehearsing her new work Dedica at the Dance Centre in Vancouver earlier this month.

Challenging doesn't begin to describe it. In the months leading up to Molnar's appointment, Ballet BC laid off the entire company – administrative staff, dancers and artistic director John Alleyne – teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, restructured financially, rehired some people, parted ways with Alleyne and cancelled plans for a 2009-2010 subscription series – during a year when the city and its culture are meant to be in the spotlight with the upcoming Olympic Games.

Likewise, there are at least two versions of Marie Laurencin’s designs. Ballet West, very enterprisingly, presents choreography, décor and costumes in versions that differ from the Royal Ballet revivals, but with the coaching of the famous androgynous Garçonne role by Georgina Parkinson, who learned the part at the Royal in 1964 from Nijinska herself. And its account of Poulenc’s score (played on tape at City Center, but live when I attended this revival in April in Salt Lake City) includes singers, a part of the composer’s conception usually omitted today.

The result is a production that, even when you can see how it could be improved, gives the audience a very clear notion of the flavor of “Les Biches.”

Why celebrate the Russian masters in your season-opening show?

I think because the Russian companies — the Bolshoi and the Kirov ballets — became such big companies and produced such incredible dancers, going all the way back to Anna Pavlova and [Vaslav] Nijinsky and later [Mikhail] Baryshnikov and [Rudolf] Nureyev; and because of Tchaikovsky — the three most-famous ballets, Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, come from Russia. It seems an apt way to begin our season.

The Russian ballet tradition is your personal tradition, too, right? I had a Russian teacher, Vera Volkova, one of the great Russian teachers, in England. Also [Tamara] Karsavina — she was Nijinsky's partner [in Sergei Diaghilev's famous Ballets Russes] — she was our mime teacher when I was in school. I was very much influenced by Russian dancers, by the power of the Russian ballet.

As if that weren’t enough, Farrell also will present the scène d’amour from Maurice Béjart’s “Roméo et Juliette,” an unusually abstract treatment of the story that Béjart, the other “Mr. B” in Farrell’s life, based on the symphonic score by Hector Berlioz.

Speaking by telephone from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where her troupe is based, the 64-year-old Farrell spoke about Balanchine’s musical sophistication. “What he wanted has so many different layers,” Farrell said. “His steps are tied in very much to the music, but not always the obvious beat. Sometimes it’s the underlying beat, sometimes it’s both. Balanchine was such a musician that there are many different ways of listening to the music and dancing in those ballets . . . beyond what’s obvious.”

So, three former Festival works – all of which make huge demands on the dancers, but offer pure entertainment to the audience. ‘The programme features three very different examples of contemporary ballet,’ says Scottish Ballet’s artistic director Ashley Page. ‘Even though Rubies dates back to 1967, it was pushing the envelope in those days and everybody still finds it hard to do well, because it’s such a challenge. All three pieces are about dancing – there are no stories, no narrative element – and it’s nice to have a triple-bill like that.’

That said, for Krzysztof Pastor, there’s no such thing as a dance that’s completely devoid of narrative. Inspired by two pieces of music by Bach, In Light and Shadow may seem abstract on the surface, but underneath the shimmering costumes and explosive movement, lies a sea of emotion. ‘I think there is always something behind a dance,’ says Pastor. ‘Because it is performed by human beings, so there has to be a story or an interpretation.

Audemars Piguet has just confirmed that it will enter into a three year deal to sponsor the popular Russian Bolshoi Ballet Theater, as well as the prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova. The move is interesting as Audemars Piguet mainly focuses on sponsoring sports events, and ballet sponsorships in the luxury watch world are rare to unheard of.