But choreographer Jorden Morris has taken the history of the dance hall to create Moulin Rouge—The Ballet, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s highest-grossing production of all time. Clearly, Morris was onto something when he thought of bringing the cancan to the barre.

“I was always intrigued by the question: how can I to transform this to pointe shoes?” the former RWB and Boston Ballet dancer says on the line from his Winnipeg home. “I really wanted the dancers to be en pointe, so I created a hybrid, a mixed breed of pointe work and cancan work. It looks cool—but it’s hard on the dancers to kick that high and relevé [to rise up onto the toes] en pointe at the same time.”

But the nub of the humour is the affectionate parody of great choreographers and their styles. This may be no more than taking genuine steps to extremes and throwing in a couple of pratfalls, but at its best, it is more intricate and subtle.

This program has more subtlety than I have seen on the Trocks' last few visits from the United States. It is also better danced than last time: you have to be very good to play around with iconic styles and steps yet maintain the template.

This is a triumph: Nikolaj Hübbe’s new production of Napoli, his company’s signature work, confounds the lip-smacking doom-mongers both in Denmark and abroad who foresaw the destruction of the finest-cut jewel of the Royal Danish Ballet’s Bournonville repertoire. Hübbe’s success is sensitively to update this storybook ballet without diminishing its charm, exchanging 1840s Naples with that of Fellini’s 1950s and detracting not one jot, the familiar Neapolitan street characters merely now in more familiar costume; indeed, in this new setting the flow of Bournonville’s astonishing invention scintillates all the more.

The biggest gamble is to rework the second act: new choreography (Hübbe’s own modern, sensuous movement) to new music (Louise Alenius’s watery, cinematic score expertly played under Graham Bond). This rights a long-standing wrong: so unpopular was this act (no Bournonville remained) that it was nicknamed the Bronnum act after the restaurant in which the audience used to sit it out. Boredom is now banished with a clever and entirely appropriate underwater foil (our heroine falls overboard in a storm) to the terra firma of Acts 1 and 3. Here Mikki Kunttu’s lighting and video affects astonish and elsewhere clouds scud deliciously over Mount Vesuvius.

Of all Kenneth MacMillan’s full-evening ballets, Mayerling seems to me the greatest, the most intense and assured in its study of emotion as in its dance. Each of the main characters is damaged, by rejection, by a quest for social or sexual power. Love is distorted, need ignored. And all this in a setting that is historically convincing, and claustrophobic as only 19th-century royalty could know. It is a ballet by which MacMillan can be judged on the most exigent terms. Nothing fails in it, neither drama nor choreography’s power to reveal the recesses of personality.

Rudolf is one of the most demanding of roles in the male repertory. We have been rewarded with performance by dancers of rarest talent, from David Wall, its great originator, and his colleagues Wayne Eagling and Stephen Jefferies, to Irek Mukhamedov and, latterly, Edward Watson, whose interpretation is a matter of the most intense psychic and physical understanding (and has recently been filmed). This season’s debut by Thiago Soares, which I saw on Tuesday at his second performance, is intriguing, very different from those that have gone before.

Bintley’s ballet was bracketed by the work of two Australians. Stanton Welch’s Powder (1998) makes a surprising return. The music is luscious — Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto — but Kandis Cook’s designs are silly and Welch’s choreography, which has the whiff of the bedroom about it, fails to generate any heat from its romantic trysts and displays of mischief. Garry Stewart’s The Centre and its Opposite is new this year, a BRB commission. It belongs to the William Forsythe school of extreme ballet, and busies the dancers in a swirl of athletic posturing and hyperkinetic virtuosity. It passes by in a blur, while Huey Benjamin’s electronic soundscape reminded me of someone sawing through metal.

The four works on view in Surfacing are "completely different, and not at all what you would expect," Molnar says. For example, Joe Laughlin, a contemporary and community-based choreographer, was interested in exploring partnering, and has created a neo-classical work on pointe to Scriabin. "You'll see a side of Joe you've never seen before," Molnar says.

Surfacing is just one marker in Molnar's emerging but specific vision for Ballet BC. "I would like to see Ballet BC become a company where choreographers think: this is where I get to experiment," she says. "I also really believe in the dancers in a company taking ownership. When I was younger, I kept giving my power away. My attitude was: I'm a blank canvas. But I learned that dancers create the forward momentum of a company. They are not just pieces in a puzzle. This is how it worked with Ballett Frankfurt under Bill Forsythe. This kind of approach nets a different result, and I believe my work as an artistic director is to build an environment in which this can happen here."

But as she and dozens of other kids prepare for their biggest performance of the year, the show's props are nowhere to be found.“We were all so upset, because I mean it's a big deal and these were major props,” said Dutcher.

The Naples Academy of Ballet says back in September, they paid Luke Schweikle $1,600 to build the sets for “The Nutcracker.”

The title of Birmingham Royal Ballet's latest triple bill, Quantum Leaps, isn't an empty boast, at least not when it comes to David Bintley's new ballet E=mc². Inspired by David Bodanis's Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation, Bintley has impressively digested his swotty source material and, using Matthew Hindson's specially commissioned score, has created a work that not only looks as urgent and brainy as the physics it evokes but is unlike anything he has choreographed before.

The work is divided into three parts, one for each component. The opening Energy section uses the clamorous percussion and brass of Hindson's music to portray its subject at its most elemental and unstable. On a stage of drifting smoke and slanted light, its 20 navy-clad dancers are clumped in teeming configurations whose patterns form and reform with a ferocious intensity. When the choreography explodes outwards into witty, pumping, spiky lines of movement, the dancers become cheer leaders of the universe, embodying and celebrating the Big Bang.