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The article presents information about several entertainment events for New York City area on January 4-10, 2008. The play "Legally Blonde," will be staged at the Palace Theater in Broadway. Singer Yuka Honda will perform at the Stone, East Village, on January 5, 2008. Dance on Camera Festival 2008 will be held at Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, on January 4-6, 2008.

The article offers information on Irina Kolpakova, a Soviet-era ballerina who teaches dancers at American Ballet Theater in New York for about 25 years. It states that Kolpakova was setting a one-act version of a 19th-century Petipa ballet entitled "Raymonda Variations," directed by Kevin McKenzie to be held at the David H. Koch Theater in New York on October 22, 2014. Also mentioned was the life and career of Kolpakova along with her several dance performances in the past years.

The article profiles French choreographer Christian Rizzo, highlighting performances of his work at the Danse: A French-American Festival of Performance and Ideas dance festival held in New York City in May of 2014. Topics addressed include Rizzo's use of minimal movement in his choreography, as well as Lyon Opera Ballet company director Yorgos Loukos' commissioning of Rizzo's work.

This article reports on the dancing of Mikhail Baryshnikov, a ballet superstar, who at 59 years old is still performing. He will dance in public at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City for the first time in six years. He will perform with a small group called Hell's Kitchen Dance in tribute to the history of a New York City neighborhood called Clinton.

The article discusses choreographer Christopher Wheeldon's leaving his residency at the New York City Ballet to found his own dance company, which is called Morphoses the Wheeldon Company. It is set to debut at the Vail International Dance Festival, followed by performances at the Sadler's Wells Theater in London and City Center in New York. Stars will be on loan from City Ballet and the Royal Ballet in London. An initial performance will include his "Polyphonia."

The article focuses on the difficulties of performing dance productions and various ballets outside. According to the author, directors and producers face a host of unpredictable complications when they leave behind the comforts and certainties of the theater. Details related to various productions being performed at Battery Park in New York City are reviewed.

A review is presented of the play "Persephone," directed by Robert Wilson at Guild Hall in New York City.

The article focuses on the works and achievements of the Krzysztof Pastor, director of Polish National Ballet. It states that the Polish National Ballet is performing a program as international and as challenging as any major companies. It mentions several ballet music staged by the company, which include "Echoes of Time", "Century Rolls" and "Moving Rooms."

The article offers information on the dance performance of New York-based Judson Dance Theater. It mentions that the group is performance a three-month series at the Danspace Project to celebrate their 50th anniversary. It also notes that the group, led by Yvonne Rainer, will also perform at St. Mark's Church.

THE choreographer Benjamin Millepied, 34, and the composer Nico Muhly, 30, have created four pieces together since 2007. The most recent, ''Two Hearts,'' will have its premiere at the New York City Ballet's spring gala on Thursday at the David H. Koch Theater. In recent conversations with Roslyn Sulcas, in New York and on the phone, they talked about their newest work and the nature of their collaboration. These are excerpts from the conversation. Q. How did you meet? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

PARIS A BALLERINA'S career path is usually predictable. She rises through the ranks of a company, dances principal roles, perhaps performs occasionally with other troupes as a guest artist. If she is lucky -- not too many injuries, a resilient body, the right temperament -- she may keep dancing into her 40s, carefully tailoring her repertory to her inevitably declining physical capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IN 1987 a program called ''Parallels in Black'' went to Europe, showcasing the work of a group of little-known African-American choreographers. Blondell Cummings, Ralph Lemon, Bebe Miller, Fred Holland and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar were all part of that tour, as was Ishmael Houston-Jones, who organized the first series of Parallels concerts in 1982. Danspace Project has been celebrating the 30th anniversary of Parallels with a series of performances, and on Tuesday it hosts a number of events under the rubric ''THIS & THAT: A DAY OF WALKING, TALKING AND WATCHING.'' At 5.30 p.m. Thomas F. DeFrantz, a professor of dance and African-American studies at Duke University, presents ''Performance Black,'' a lecture of sorts about histories of black dance in the United States. It won't be dull; Mr. DeFrantz is charisma incarnate. It also won't be long: at 6 p.m., Mr. Houston-Jones and Mr. Cummings will talk to Henry Pillsbury and Barbara Watson, the director and assistant director of the American Center in Paris at the time of the group's 1987 performances there. And at 8 p.m. Will Rawls offers ''Coining,'' a screening of works made for film and video that investigate sexuality, politics, gender and black culture -- this and that. St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, (866) 811-4111, danspaceproject.org; free. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The love for Jose Manuel Carreno poured across the Metropolitan Opera House stage in almost palpable waves as one by one, his fellow dancers, his colleagues and his daughters delivered bouquets of flowers at the end of his final New York performance on Thursday with American Ballet Theater, where he had been a principal since 1995. There are few dancers as adored by both balletomanes and the general public as Mr. Carreno. Handsome, but not untouchably so; charming; infallibly courteous; a superb partner with a virile stage presence and a reliably plush, polished technique, he has been one of the standard-bearers of Ballet Theater's reputation for brilliant male dancers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Well before just about every choreographer on the planet declared their allegiance to multidisciplinary work, Meredith Monk was creating pieces that defied characterization in their use of song, speech, movement, film and images. In the early-to-mid 1960s, when Ms. Monk was part of the radical group of artists beginning to show work at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, she was already using dance as just one component in her layered pieces -- and not always a large component at that. And yet the movement that she does use is so specific and deliberate, so fused with her vocal meanderings and strange, mystic world of archetypes, that it becomes an inextricably important part of the whole. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Ballet Nacional de Cuba's short season, which opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday, also concludes the Si Cuba! Festival, which has brought all things Cuban to the city for several weeks now. That's a good thing, as is, in theory, the rare appearance of this company, a breeding ground for the many marvelous Cuban dancers in major ballet companies all over the United States and abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sampler programs -- bits and pieces from different artists -- are a gamble for both presenters and audiences. Perhaps everyone will show the same kind of work? Perhaps all the lighting will be dim and the costumes brown? Perhaps the styles will be so widely disparate or obscure as to leave watchers with furrowed brows? The Gotham Dance Festival, presented by the Gotham Arts Exchange, has taken that gamble, presenting two weekends of sampler matinees during its two-week run at the Joyce Theater. The first batch had Kyle Abraham, Faye Driscoll and Gregory Dolbashian, all showing recent or new work. (Next weekend, Ashleigh Leite, Julian Barnett and Sydney Skybetter get their turn.) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A mild tremor of excitement ran through the New York City Ballet audience on Sunday afternoon as the cast of George Balanchine's ''Slaughter on Tenth Avenue'' took a bow. The dark-suited and hatted dancer who had played the ''Big Boss'' in the delightful tale of murder and mayhem at the ballet, had just popped out of the wings, performed a quick, modest salute, and popped back in. It took a moment to realize that the Big Boss was in fact the Big Boss. Peter Martins, the ballet master in chief of the company, had stepped in for an injured Ask la Cour the previous night, and reappeared at the matinee with no fanfare or announcement of the change in cast. Mr. Martins, who retired from dancing in 1983, hasn't appeared onstage since dancing in a pas de deux with Suzanne Farrell at her farewell performance in 1989. But he clearly hasn't forgotten the tricks of the trade, even jumping nimbly off a high table (those of us who had recognized him winced for his knees) and rolling on the floor as he fought Andrew Veyette as the Hoofer. The only concession Mr. Martins made to age and experience was to forgo wearing tights. We understand. This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Simone Forti's ''Slant Board'' was first performed in 1961 in Yoko Ono's loft on Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan. Ms. Ono was not at the Fitzroy Gallery in SoHo on Thursday night, where this 10-minute piece was presented a single time as part of the exhibition ''Shelf Ramp Wedge Bridge/1.'' But a host of art world and performance art figures, including Carolee Schneemann, Charlemagne Palestine, Joan Jonas and Dan Graham, were part of a packed crowd on hand for Ms. Forti, a choreographer often associated with the Judson Dance Theater although never formally a part of it. Like Trisha Brown and other Judson artists, Ms. Forti took Robert Dunn's dance composition classes, in which John Cage's methods for creating music, employing scores or making game plans were used to engender performance. But Ms. Forti was earlier deeply influenced by Anna Halprin's emphasis on forthright tasks and problem solving, creating natural, nonspecialized movement in which the unadorned body was the art object itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a very particular relationship between dancer and audience in a small space: emotions and expressions are palpable, effort and intensity clear. That's the advantage of the tiny theater in the basement of the Museum of Arts and Design, where the monthly series Dance Under the Influence began in February. The disadvantage is that the stage is just eight feet deep. As Ronald K. Brown, one of the performers on the program Wednesday night, put it after the show, ''You can't really do a diagonal.'' But the works, chosen by Valerie Gladstone, fit remarkably well into the cramped space. And in the case of the flamenco dancer Nelida Tirado, the intimacy felt particularly fitting as she traded smiles with the musicians who performed alongside her or suddenly closed her eyes in frowning, ferocious concentration as her feet stamped out rattling, rhythmically complex tattoos of sound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an unexpected intersection of celebrity pop music and ballet -- that most refined of the performing arts -- Paul McCartney has written a major orchestral work for the New York City Ballet. It is a love story titled ''Ocean's Kingdom'' and will have its premiere at the company's fall gala on Sept. 22, with other performances on dates to be announced next season, Mr. McCartney and company officials said on Wednesday. City Ballet's ballet master in chief, Peter Martins, will create the choreography. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It's interesting how much effect context has on perceptions of a show. For the last few years Bill Young and Colleen Thomas have offered the LIT series, informal presentations of their own and other people's work in their SoHo loft. On Friday night Mr. Young and Ms. Thomas opened the 92nd Street YHarkness Dance Festival by creating a rough approximation of that setting in the Y's Buttenwieser Hall. The audience was placed in an L around the stage space, with some people at small cafe tables and others on couches or chairs. A D.J. was spinning music as people arrived, and a cash bar was doing steady business. It was an atmosphere that encouraged a certain sense of tolerance and fun, and although the program, LITup, was uneven and sometimes dutifully experimental, it was the kind of show you could have taken a dance novice to with good results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For many American children Christmas and ''The Nutcracker'' go together like candy and cane. You can't walk into a supermarket in December without hearing Tchaikovsky's music for the ballet, or at least some version thereof, and white-wigged Nutcracker dolls can be found at the 99-cent store. But for Alexei Ratmansky, whose much-awaited new ''Nutcracker'' for American Ballet Theater opens at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday, Christmas was a minor holiday as a child, with no associations whatsoever with mice, toy soldiers or sugarplums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the start of Risa Jaroslow's new piece, ''The Partner Project/Scene in Public,'' a woman (Elise Knudson) walks briskly around the edge of the audience and then onto the stage, wearing a light coat. This may be a nod to New York's frigid weather. But the fact that it takes a moment to register Ms. Knudson as a dancer, stepping from public realm to stage, seems emblematic of Ms. Jaroslow's work, which has frequently blurred the lines between art and life in its use of nondancers and its preoccupation with community. ''The Partner Project,'' which opened at Danspace Project on Thursday, is a lot more hermetic than this beginning and its subsequent passages suggest. Ms. Knudson, lifting and bending one leg in the center of the stage, is joined by Paul Singh, who holds on to her foot as he makes the announcements usually offered by a front-of-house manager. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a low-key, low-budget event featuring relatively unknown dance-makers, the Young Choreographers Showcase at the Manhattan Movement & Arts Center on Sunday night included an impressive number of stars and an enviable buzz. Ballet luminaries studded the audience, and a crowd waiting for ticket returns considerably delayed the start of the program. When the showcase did begin, the evening's organizer, Emery LeCrone, provided a charming apology and an accomplished introduction to the other four participating choreographers. Ms. LeCrone was the only woman, probably overrepresenting the general percentage of female ballet choreographers, but perhaps the most experienced of the group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

NEW YORK CITY BALLET'S first fall season at Lincoln Center has come and gone, along with talking dancers and conductors. (We, and they, survived.) Until this year, when New York City Opera ceded the time slot, audiences had to wait until late November and ''The Nutcracker'' to see the company, and City Ballet often toured abroad at this time. It was invigorating to have its performances as part of the general cultural rush of the fall, and the season, which ended last Sunday, was intriguing in ways both usual -- the charting of dancers' progress, debuts in roles, new work -- and, in at least one case, unexpected. The unexpected part came from a known quantity. Or at least a quantity we think we know. Peter Martins, 63, the company's ballet master in chief, has created more than 80 pieces for City Ballet since 1977, when at Balanchine's urging he choreographed his first work, ''Calcium Light Night.'' He usually choreographs at least one new piece, often two, each season, and the critical drill is that at best these are competent, musically adventurous, generally unexciting ballets. At worst, they are overworked, overthought, overpartnered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The annual School of American Ballet workshop has been a talent-spotting highlight of the New York balletomane's year ever since George Balanchine and Alexandra Danilova instituted the performances in 1965. In the lobby of the Peter Jay Sharp Theater before Saturday afternoon's first performance this year, old hands reminisced about seeing Gelsey Kirkland, Kyra Nichols, Peter Boal and Monique Meunier in their student days. It's a lot to live up to, but the students seem bright and innocent in the enthusiasm they show onstage. It wasn't true on Saturday or on Tuesday night that -- as is sometimes said -- the school performs some pieces better than New York City Ballet. But there is undoubtedly something especially touching in the unfettered joy these students show in movement, a joy that professional dancers can exchange for competence as they are sucked into the grinding routine of a company. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

True or false: New York City Ballet is home to neo-classical dance, the living tribute to the abstract, pared-down aesthetic with which George Balanchine revolutionized 20th-century ballet? True. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The days when choreographers had lofts in SoHo, where they lived, and friends came over and drank wine and watched works in progress, and threw some money into a bowl, and then everyone sat around talking about the dances, are over, no? Apparently not. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although we don't think about it much in daily life, the way someone moves is as distinctive as a voice or facial features. Of course some movements, voices or features are more striking than others. So it is, in dance terms, with Stephen Petronio, one of the few contemporary choreographers to have created an instantly recognizable style and also a substantial oeuvre, built over 25 years upon hard-driving, limb-lashing, fascinatingly dense coordinations. You see the source of this style as soon as the curtain goes up on ''#3,'' a 1986 solo performed by Mr. Petronio at the start of his company's current program, which opened at the Joyce Theater on Tuesday night. In black pants, white shirt and loosened necktie, Mr. Petronio twists his torso and gestures enigmatically, his movements as tight, mannered and constrained as the music (by Lenny Pickett) is loose and jazzy. But his twitchy, ripply segues from one position to another, the non sequitur sequences, the lightning fast changes of dynamic, all speak of his own kinetic personality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

IN a municipal hall in the township of Joza, close to 100 children and teenagers stood looking apprehensively at Ronald K. Brown, the artistic director of the Evidence Dance Company of Brooklyn. As seven of the Evidence dancers gently organized the children into rough lines, another dancer, Joel Sule Adams, beat out a rhythm on drums while Mr. Brown started to swing his arms in simple circles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Big Apple Circus continues through Monday in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center; (888) 541-3750, bigapplecircus.org. When the Big Apple Circus sets up shop every winter on the Lincoln Center Plaza, it's as if a small village has suddenly appeared next to the Metropolitan Opera House. There is not just the five-story-tall big top, but dozens of trailers in which 150 performers, technicians, administrative staff and their families and animals, live, eat, socialize and send their children to school. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since Doug Elkins created ''Fraulein Maria,'' his witty, charming homage to ''The Sound of Music,'' three years ago, it has become a cultish annual ritual for certain dancegoers. By force of circumstance, the cult has remained contained: ''Fraulein'' had its premiere on the tiny stage of Joe's Pub, which holds commensurately small audiences. And there was something (indeed, much) to be said for watching this marvelously entertaining piece up close, martini in hand. (Of course, no on-duty reviewer for The New York Times has ever done the martini part.) But this year ''Fraulein Maria'' has moved to the comparatively large stage of Dance Theater Workshop. On Friday half the audience seemed to be regulars, discussing whether they liked the change to a bigger stage, or whom they preferred in certain roles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

''We have had one complaint,'' explained Ishmael Houston-Jones, presenter of the third and final program of the Movement Research Fall Festival on Saturday night at Danspace Project. ''There has been no full-frontal male nudity.'' With that, Mr. Houston-Jones removed the dressing gown he was wearing, and proceeded with his introduction in nothing but an undershirt and socks. That was rather a tough act to follow. But the subsequent short performances -- varied, if uneven -- mostly sustained the level of attention that Mr. Houston-Jones had so adroitly raised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

''Butoh?'' a friend said when I reported that I was off to the Cave New York Butoh Festival. ''Is that the one where they are naked, with white body paint and move very slowly?'' All except the paint were correct when it came to ''Furnace,'' the ensemble piece that opened the festival on Thursday night at Dixon Place. Produced biennially by Cave, an experimental-art space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the festival celebrates Butoh, a movement form that began in Japan in the late 1950s as a reaction against Western contemporary dance and a covert political challenge to authority. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the start of each program of work by Garth Fagan Dance comes a quick tutorial in Mr. Fagan's distinctive style and intentions. On Tuesday night at the Joyce Theater that lesson came in its most distilled form. Norwood Pennewell, who has been dancing with Mr. Fagan's company for an astonishing 31 years, leaped onto the stage in silence. He balanced on one leg in a near-balletic attitude position, tipped his upper body forward and swiveled, then did something very like that again -- and again, all the while remaining poised on one leg as the other scythed calmly through the air. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

CHRISTOPHER WHEELDON wasn't feeling cheerful. As he sat in a restaurant in Lower Manhattan in April, his usual store of ebullience seemed spent as he offered a startlingly frank assessment of his ballet company, Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company, which he started with much fanfare almost three years ago. ''I intend to give it everything I've got,'' he said. ''But I have to be realistic. I don't know whether we will make it.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As the Balletto Teatro di Torino performed Matteo Levaggi's ''Primo Toccare'' on Wednesday night at the Joyce Theater, it was hard not to brood that William Forsythe has much to answer for. In the early 1980s Mr. Forsythe gave ballet a quantum push into new terrain by freeing the torso from its corsetlike carriage, allowing movement and momentum to be engendered from any part of the body, and playing with the principles of verticality, balance and ease that characterize classical technique. These ideas are still reverberating among dance creators, particularly in Europe, and Mr. Levaggi, the resident choreographer of the Balletto Teatro di Torino (making its first appearance in New York), is no exception. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]