With "Sleeping Beauty", the third ballet in Matthew Bourne's Tchaikovsky trilogy that includes "Nutcracker!" and "Swan Lake", the award-winning British choreographer has once again proved himself to be not only a gifted dancemaker but a masterful storyteller. The production, correctly billed as "A Gothic Romance", is playing at New York's…

 As I mentioned last week in my largely favorable review of one of the San Francisco Ballet’s mixed bills at the Koch Theatre in NYC, the company under the direction of Helgi Tómmasen is first rate. Yet the excellent dancing in Christopher Wheeldon’s “Cinderella”, which I saw on Friday evening, couldn’t save the production from being overwrought and hard to follow. The opening scenes, with the child Cinderella suffering the untimely death of her mother and the teenage…

I still remember how surprised I was as a young dancer to learn that the first professional ballet company in the United States, the San Francisco Ballet, was not established until 1933. Given the fact that the Paris Opera Ballet was founded almost three centuries earlier in 1673, I realized that dance in America is very young indeed. Yet I am happy to report that on the evening of October 18^th 2013 at the Koch Theater…

I have always told my ballet students that because the art form is kept alive by each new generation of dancers, we must be as proficient in historical styles as we are in contemporary techniques. The important works of the past cannot be hung on museum walls the way the paintings of the masters are. Instead, we have to recreate what came before us or else the ballets will be lost. Years ago when I made that speech, I was referring to the centuries-old ballet classics. Yet…