Classic ballet yielded to innovation when Neenan, the Company’s choreographer in residence, presented the world premiere of At the Border, his 12th commission for the Pennsylvania Ballet. Neenan wanted to explore the idea of crossing borders, moving from one space to another and the process it takes to get where one is going. In this work, 14 dancers continually moved across the stage, breaking into large and small groups, and changing partnerships.

Rodeo, Agnes de Mille’s spirited ode to Americana, told the unexpected story of a tomboy in search of love. With cowboy boots and calico dresses, this western ballet was the precursor to de Mille’s choreography for the musical Oklahoma!, complete with a rousing hoedown that was an audience favorite.

A Raleigh doctor accused of driving drunk and causing a crash that killed a Winston-Salem ballerina last month didn't show up for a scheduled hearing Monday morning because he is in rehab.

Given she’s been off injured for a year, Sarah Lamb understandably took things carefully.

Although she had a small part in the season-opening Mayerling, Sleeping Beauty is Lamb’s first three-act biggie since the injury (she broke three metatarsal bones in her left foot in Paris), and her performance deserved every one of the flowers the Opera House arranged for her curtain call.

It may be the most sumptuous fairytale you have ever seen. The stunning vision of Petipa’s haut-classical choreography is matched by the glowing spectacle of Oliver Messel’s original 1946 designs (The Sleeping Beauty reopened the Royal Opera House after the Second World War, a blaze of opulence at a time of austerity). And though Peter Farmer’s new costumes are so pale they look in need of a blood transfusion, it’s the full visual panoply that astounds.

The production, staged by Monica Mason and Christopher Newton (after Ninette de Valois and Nicholas Sergeyev), moves beautifully, a vibrant, exhilarating, deliriously classical feast for corps de ballet, soloists and principals alike. And when you have the Russian conductor Valeriy Ovsyanikov in the pit, the music soars. He mines Tchaikovsky’s great score for every ounce of sweeping grandeur and dramatic expectation.

Being time-based arts, it seems fair to expect some kind of trajectory when music and dance cooperate on stage. It doesn’t have to be linear with a beginning, middle and end though the piece should move somewhere. But I have given up to look for that in the works of Alonzo King. What he creates, I think, is a sense of suspended time, perhaps something akin to the eternal presence. In his own and for his dancers imagination, he uses a pointillist painter’s palette who puts his canvasses together from hundreds of individual dots. Together they create the shimmering work of art.