Nine pas de deux, several of them rarities in the Bay Area, made up "The Balanchine Couple," buoyed by Farrell's concise and insightful narration. The most intriguing moments: "The Unanswered Question" from "Ivesiana" (1954), in which the feet of the woman (Holowchuk) never touch the ground; and the 1963 "Meditation," Balanchine's first work for Farrell. The overt emotionalism (the man summons a vision of a lost love) may reflect on the choreographer's feelings for his ballerina. Magnicaballi and Michael Cook rendered it with barely suppressed passion.

The pas de deux from "La Sonnambula" featured the poet (rosh) toying with the eponymous and constantly bourreeing sleepwalker (Kendra Mitchell) and served as a reminder that this lovely romantic work has been missing from the San Francisco Ballet repertoire for more than three decades. A few of the program's entries disappointed, but all testified to Balanchine's disavowal of any abstractionist ideals: "Put a man and a girl on the stage, and there is already a story."

The Royal Ballet’s historic first tour to Cuba in July this year – the first major foreign dance company to visit the country in almost three decades – will also be profiled alongside a documentary on the Bolshoi Ballet.

Other scheduled broadcasts include programmes on literature and visual arts, the multi award-winning Autism: The Musical, which profiles five young autistic children and their families during the creation of a music theatre piece in Los Angeles, and Mark Cousins’ magic-realist film The First Movie, made with Kurdish-Iraqi children.

It would be perhaps presuming too much to suggest that King means anything in particular by the title, although a motif of fracturing and re-forming groups, like rays of light in a prism, threads its way throughout the piece. But about "Refraction" there is less of the feeling of a code or formula than meditation. As with Moran's score, King seems to be pulling his structures apart and reexamining them. But, while it seems entirely fair to ask questions - what is it about and what is King trying to say - at another level, it's more than possible to simply appreciate the sensuality and sensibilities of the performers onstage and in the pit.

Posters, sketches, breadboard models, stage scenery, and paintings by some of the best artists of the 20th Century – Giorgio de Chirico, Natalia Goncharova, Leon Bakst – will be seen at the expo.

Almost 50 original costumes, including constructivist costumes designed by Mikhail Larionov for “Chout” ballet (to the music by Sergei Prokofiev) and hand-painted suits for “Le Chant du Rossignol” designed by Henri Matisse are on display. There is even an original curtain brought from London created to a design by Pablo Picasso.

A career with Rambert and, from 1984, in his own troupe beckoned. But vital to Clark's brand of iconoclasm is that although he left ballet, ballet never left him. As a dancer – even when cheerfully baring his rear, coquettishly swinging a handbag or performing with a lavatory-bowl around his neck – he has always displayed an unmistakably classical, very beautiful, near-Ashtonian sense of physical bearing and "line". And his choreography continues to benefit from the same striking, strutting, serene fusion of tradition and modernity.

"Classicism is definitely part of my vocabulary," he says. "I was trained very well by Richard Glastone at the the Royal Ballet School, in a way that made absolute physical sense to me. I think maybe at one point in my teens I tried to reject that, but it's really just a part of the way I think and move, that notion of 'line' being a continuous thread through a phrase of movement."

Most telling of all were Farrell’s comments on “Meditation,” the 1963 work that originally was created for her. She spoke of being 18 years old and never having fallen in love, yet being asked to dance this duet that quite clearly is about romantic longing. “I suggested that maybe the choreography should be adapted because I was making it awkward,” she recalled. “And Mr. B. said, ‘No, it’s fine, and besides, love is often awkward.’”

After many nights at the Nutcracker, it was time to refresh the annual gala and put a different spin on the evening. That happened several years ago, when executive director Harris Ferris took the reins.

Although De Valois's statement sounds weirdly self-effacing, it has a historical truth. Look at the top women in dance history: most seem to have been active when the art form was in some kind of transition. It was the early, experimental phase of modern dance, the 1920s and 30s, that saw women such as Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Mary Wigman at the forefront, just as it was women such as De Valois, Marie Rambert, Bronislava Nijinska and Ida Rubinstein who formed many of the first independent ballet companies. The US postmodern scene of the 1960s was led by women, just as the emerging independent dance movement in Britain was headed by the likes of Siobhan Davies, Rosemary Butcher, Yolande Snaith, Lea Anderson and Shobana Jeyasingh.

Arguably, it's just at the point when dance starts to become glamorous, exciting, profitable and successful that the men step in. The UK is not alone in having an unnervingly male A-list of choreographers: the international scene also has only a few women, such as Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, to rival the supremacy of Mark Morris, William Forsythe, Jiˇrí Kylián, Christopher Wheeldon and Alexei Ratmansky. Recent research in the US showed that only 10 out of the top 59 dance companies were run by women. In 2000, a list of 18 grants awarded to modern choreographers by the National Endowment of the Arts featured just five women. Worse, the average size of each award amounted to $10,000 for men and just $5,000 for women.