But Kent was also emotionally restrained, and her dancing dry. Her doomed heroine remained lifeless. Kent emphasized the girl's frailties, without drawing for us the bubbly girl who will later defend and forgive the man who deceived her. Normally an exceptionally light dancer, she was unaccountably earthbound Tuesday and unable to hold poses for long. For her character's iconic solo moments, however, she marshaled enough energy for steady hops on toe, and lifted skyward for the various series of beats, providing momentary excitement.

Another ABT veteran, Jose Manuel Carreño, was Kent's Albrecht, and he enveloped her in an attentive warmth and always-steady partnering. His ardor was apparent, if not overwhelming, and his clashes with rival Hilarion (Gennadi Saveliev) had appropriate tension. Bravura dancing was for another night, but Carreño did not disappoint, thanks to his elongated line and lyrical style.

The surprise in Wayne McGregor's new Limen is his evolving style. McGregor is the Royal's resident choreographer and until now we've know him for his highly articulated, almost insect-like movement vocabulary. In Limen he includes a softening line and sensuous poise. The duet for Melissa Hamilton and Eric Underwood features gorgeously sinuous lifts and falling catches, and looks every bit the love duet you least expect from McGregor.

Last night the Royal Ballet fielded its latest mixed bill, which looked thrown on in a hurry. When artists of calibre of Kobborg and Carlos Acosta look blurry in Balanchine’s Agon, a ballet that both have danced with high distinction in the past, I wonder if it was partly because they were out of synch with a conductor who was failing to control the pit (Daniel Capps), or partly because they had not had time to switch mindsets.

She's back in Richmond this week for her fifth commission here, a full-length performance based on the art of Piet Mondrian. "Lines Squared" is paired with a revival of George Balanchine's "Apollo" for the Richmond Ballet Studio 1 series that runs through Sunday. "I love his work," she said of Mondrian, the Dutch painter best known for straight lines, cubes and primary colors.

What didn’t you dance that you wanted to? 'Liebeslieder Walzer'?

Yes.

And didn’t you tell Balanchine, “No—I’m too busy,” when he asked you to do it?

Oh, why did I do that? Well, I was overwhelmed. We can’t look back. We have to look at this moment. And today is beautiful.

This born-again version of “The Red Shoes,” digitally resuscitated from battered prints and negatives, should surprise even those who have watched the fine Criterion DVD. A film like few others, made like few others — the Powell and Pressburger partnership remains sui generis — it reaches high and strikes its mark, at times improbably. It’s an insistently designed work of non-naturalism, daubed with startling, unreal, gaudy colors that seem to have been created to blast away the last traces of wartime drear. The colors in “The Red Shoes” don’t just exist, they also express. “Color and I are one,” the painter Paul Klee said. When watching “The Red Shoes,” it’s easy to imagine Powell saying the same. Instead, he said, “I am cinema.”

The New Jersey Ballet’s classically trained dancers have never worked with Chen, and her style — full of spirals, back-rolls and unfamiliar gestures — needed to work its way into their muscles. For the first time, she invented steps for ballerinas on pointe. “It’s a totally different body language,” Chen says, explaining that she didn’t even try to improvise in the studio, as she would have done if she were creating a dance for her own company. “I had to plan everything ahead of time.” So as the opera’s lush orchestration gradually took possession of her consciousness, Chen found herself inventing phrases at odd moments. “I dream about the music. It’s a 24-hour thing,” she says.

How did The Red Shoes influence you?

I think a lot of the people who have asked me this question are very young, and they don’t know the kind of films that we saw when we were young. Because there was no rating system, you’d go see a Western and it was playing with Sunset Boulevard, you know what I’m saying? The Big Heat with Fritz Lang ... it affects you, in a way. It reflected a different world. So we accepted all kinds of images of other cultures. And, of course, The Red Shoes represents another culture. What really stuck with me, besides the provocation of the film, the intensity and the passion of the picture, was the fact that it has more to do with the need to create something — whether it’s dance, music, painting, acting, or, in my case, we just started making pictures. There is an obsession — you don’t know why you want to, but you want to, and you may not be very good, but you have to do it anyway.

Sandwiched awkwardly between Agon and Limen, Glen Tetley’s Sphinx appears clunky and out of date. Marianela Nunez breathes sophistication into the piece, yet even her elegant performance cannot help it stand up against McGregor’s stunningly cerebral premiere.

Mr. Zoritch opened a ballet school in West Hollywood in 1964, two years after the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, in which he was the mainstay, was dissolved. He taught at the University of Arizona in Tucson from 1973 to 1987 and more recently served on the jury at the Perm ballet competitions in Russia.

Born in Moscow on June 6, 1917, he moved after the Russian revolution with his mother and brother to Kovno, Lithuania, where he first studied ballet. Mr. Zoritch, who leaves no immediate survivors, then settled in Paris at 14 and studied with the Maryinsky ballerina Olga Preobrajenska, who also trained the “baby ballerinas” promoted by George Balanchine.

At the San Francisco Ballet, which orders custom pointe shoes from Freed in London - they retail for about $85 a pair - female dancers go through five to 12 per month, depending on the shape of the foot, the fit of the shoe and how often they dance.

Ballet technique and aesthetics — and our knowledge of African music and dance traditions — have evolved enough over the last few decades to make these kinds of couplings look both naïve and condescending. There is no thrill of unpredictability in seeing Ms. Armitage’s classically trained dancers jiving alongside the dancers and musicians of Burkina Electric, whose West African-inspired pop-electronica underpins the show. Without any real understanding of the African-dance weight and rhythms, the ballet dancers just look silly. And when Ms. Armitage creates sections in which all the performers move together, the result is like aerobics routines for beginners.

“I always consider myself just one of the guys. I get that a lot at work. Even though they are men in tights, they’re still like, ‘Amber, you are one of the boys.’”

While gay boys are still considered the norm the 25-year-old Australian hopes her unique status as an out lesbian in ballet — we can’t think of another working at this level — might inspire those who’ve never considered seeing a ballet to look again. “I love seeing the kids after a performance looking for autographs, but I want to see some women from the community out there.”