Erica Cornejo danced the title role on opening night, infusing the fragile and luckless Giselle with an otherworldly air. It’s a role fit for a star. Cornejo is just that.

In Act One she’s the impatient object of affection, ready to burst out of her mother’s cautious arms and dance for joy. In Act Two she’s a gossamer ghost, reaching out from the grave to protect her suitor. Either way, Cornejo danced with the grace, virtuosity and halting awkwardness the role demanded.

The legendary music and ballet theatre in the Russian capital shut its doors in 2005 for a major restoration that was originally supposed to have been completed in 2008. But the target date now has been set back to October 2011 and there have even been fears that this could even prove premature for the main contractor, private company Kurortproekt.

"We have warned the main contractor that we are on the verge of dispensing with their services," Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov told reporters in comments broadcast on state television.

Ten leading National Ballet of Canada dancers returned on Thursday from a three-city sortie to British Columbia. The trip to Victoria, Nanaimo and Vancouver was all that could be salvaged from an aborted full-company tour of Western Canada featuring its lavish production of The Sleeping Beauty.

At close to 70 dancers, it is the only Canadian company with the resources to present the full-length classics in all their splendour. It abandoned touring Eastern Canada years ago – too small a market – and these days rarely visits Montreal. The company has nevertheless endeavoured to live up to the "National" in its title by visiting the West every other year and would have this September if it could have afforded to. In April, faced with the possibility of losing buckets of money, the ballet decide to cancel.

The most extreme virtuosity wedded to the most exuberantly human, wonderfully individualistic spirit of performance. That is the most lasting impression of Friday's astonishing performance by Miami City Ballet, the company founded and directed by Edward Villella that is making its very first visit to Chicago this weekend and is truly storming the stage of the Auditorium Theatre.

The company demonstrated its mastery from the start -- with the stunning initial image in George Balanchine's "Symphony in Three Movements," the fiendishly difficult ensemble work set to the Stravinsky score of the same name.

The Russian-themed evening opened with Serenade, George Balanchine's enduring setting of music of Tchaikovsky. In the negative column, the razor-sharp ensemble precision this piece needs was occasionally missing, and the canned music preempted those moments when spur-of-the-moment timing is vital. Still, principal dancers Carolyn Judson, Leticia Oliveira, Lisa Kaczmarek, Carl Coomer, and Alexander Kotelenets all created that sense of definite personality essential to Serenade, and the piece ultimately worked most of its inherent magic.