This year being the centenary of the first performances by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which redefined the art of ballet — and, with it, music and design — for the 20th century, dance companies around the world have been mounting revivals of historic works or latching on to relevant themes for reinterpretations and new experiments for the 21st century.

Sadler’s Wells’s contribution was last week’s special programme, In the Spirit of Diaghilev, for which Alistair Spalding, who runs the theatre, commissioned four British-based contemporary choreographers who are associate artists of the Wells — Wayne McGregor, Russell Maliphant, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Javier de Frutos — to create new pieces inspired by the Diaghilev ethos of collaboration.

Balanchine was apparently so wrapped up in his own experiments that everything else in the culture was just background noise. We see it today, and it seems centuries old. We appreciate it for the cleverness inside the elegance, sure, but maybe we appreciate that it is SO resolutely disconnected from the real world. Any real world. At any time. It has the pleasures of a geometry problem made physical: It suggests a pure and perfectly danced place where whatever the current anxiety is in the world outside the theater simply doesn't matter.

Depending on your state of mind, depending on what you need at the moment, "Emeralds" can be a great relief or a great insult. Or just monumentally beside the point. "Silly" as one one nearby audience member said. Or "beautiful" as another suggested.

The most challenging part, however, may well be in the technique of the dance itself.
"We do a lot of contemporary work, and with dancers today, the techniques are blending," Wood says. "We're always learning classical ballet in morning class, but this pushes the envelope a little more. . . . It's very difficult to get some things to not look so 20th century. When you're doing a contemporary piece, it can be creative. You may be able to swizzle out of something. There's a bit of a safety net there. But there are no safety nets in this choreography."

The conversation is quiet but characteristically intense as Alonzo King and his dancers try to work out the shape of the rehearsal periods for the day. It seems that the creative drive and the relentless demands of Lines Ballet's schedule have bumped up against the physical realities for the nine company members - no one wants to interrupt the momentum as the company races to create two world premiere works, but there are corporeal limitations to consider, too.

Michael Lowe
Lowe, director of Oakland Ballet, which just performed King's "Love Dogs," worked with King in the '70s in Carlos Carvajal's Dance Spectrum.

"Even then, one could tell he was destined to be a choreographer with his own voice. Having taught for the school in the early 2000s and danced in two of his works at Oakland Ballet, I learned the tenacity of exhausting and exploring all possibilities while rehearsing his ballets. Alonzo has the magic within to get his artists to dance beyond themselves and perform on the edge."

There were definitely some good moments. One of Director Septime Webre's smartest moves was to invite National Ballet of Cuba's prima ballerina, Viengsay Valdes, to dance Kitri at three performances. She's been dancing the role for years, is a stellar technician, and could be expected to inspire the company's dancers (as ABT's David Hallberg did last season in TWB's fine production of "La Sylphide.") Valdes toned down her star power a bit from what I remembered from her performance here a few years ago with her home company (and as shown on a currently available DVD) and it's a credit to her taste and graciousness that she did, because had she come out guns blazing, she would have completely dominated the production. Her performance was in scale, and I liked her for that. Valdes is an excellent, yet not a hard, technician: a spirited Kitri in the first act, a softly enticing Dulcinea in the second, before getting down to business and turning in a medal-winning level grand pas de deux. Valdes is known, for good reason, for her balances. She could take an arabesque, polish each fingernail, choose another color and polish them again without bothering the floor with her foot, and all this without a conductor to stretch out the music. Some love this, some do not. I would much rather see beautiful lines and an overheld balance than a whole evening of ballerinas kicking their heads at every opportunity, but that's a matter of taste.

Eychaner, a slender, bald man with circular glasses who describes himself as semi-retired, said he spends most of his time "asking for money" and "cementing coalitions" on the company's behalf. He has been successful.

The Joffrey's budget grew from $12.5 million in 2008 to $13.8 million in 2009. For the first time, the company will host three more-costly, full-length ballets in one season ("Othello," "The Nutcracker" and " Cinderella"), Eychaner said.

"The economy is pretty miserable, but we're trying to step up and offer deeper programming while other people are cutting back," he said. "And we're going to balance the budget both years."

Seven dancers from the Sarasota Ballet will be performing in "Contact," which features three individual sections dealing with how we make contact or start communication with people.

Few words are spoken in the first two pieces, "The Swing" and "Did You Move?" though there is far more in the final section called "Contact," about a suicidal advertising executive who finds a renewed value for life after dancing with the "Girl in the Yellow Dress" in a run-down dance bar on Manhattan's Lower East Side.