Melissa Barak, an ex-City Ballet dancer and sometime choreographer, has put together an unspeakably dopey and incompetent mess called 'Call Me Ben,' combining ultra-generic dance, terrible dialogue and disastrous storytelling, about the founding of Las Vegas by the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who insists, violently, on being addressed as 'Ben.'

Raimund Hoghe is a little man with a spinal deformity who was once Pina Bausch's dramaturge.

'Black Swan' does what Hollywood movies have always done - it spends its energies on getting some surface things right while getting everything important wrong. Darren Aronofsky, the director, applies the same techniques and the same sensibility here as he did with 'The Wrestler,' only with a prettier protagonist.

What really matters is that 'Black Swan' deploys and exaggerates all the cliches of earlier ballet movies, especially 'The Red Shoes,' another tale of a ballerina driven mad and suicidal.

Nothing is harder to create than brilliant comic ballets, except maybe brilliant full-evening comic ballets.

'Porgy and Bess' has never been thought of as a dance show, and yet it's filled with dance. It uses dance to punctuate the action, or as background, or as atmosphere; even when it's front and center, it isn't crucial.

Twyla Tharp set her sights on ballet, and ballet, hungry for major talent, succumbed.

The eternal and uneasy relationship between ballet and modern dance endures, but radically altered in tone and intensity.

Young women today, as in the fifties, find themselves entering the big world and having to make choices.

Paris, as always, is swarming with Americans, and these days, it's also swarming with hamburgers. Oddly, though, it's not typically the Americans who are pursuing the perfect burger on the perfect bun with the obligatory side of perfect coleslaw; the Americans are pursuing the perfect blanquette de veau.

Some readers took 'Heaven's My Destination' as a satire on Christianity and the Midwest, but today it reads like a loving comedy.

Acting has changed since the nineteen-forties.

When I was at Cambridge in the early fifties, there was a school nearby for training Army officers in Russian, and some imaginative genius came up with the idea of putting on Russian plays with the students to improve their language skills.

Just as I was turning fifteen, in the spring of 1946, my parents took me to see 'The Glass Menagerie,' well into its year-long run. I had seen a number of shows on Broadway by then, but nothing like this - because there was nothing like this on Broadway.

Every great dance company, even when it seems poised in perfect balance, needs constant renewal of both repertory and performers.

For Russians, to whom Pushkin's poem 'Eugene Onegin' is sacred text, the ballet's story and personae are as familiar and filled with meaning as, for instance, 'Romeo' and 'Hamlet' are for us. Russians know whole stretches of it by heart, the way we know Shakespeare and Italians know Dante.

Wayne McGregor's 'Dyad 1929' is a good example of this capable British choreographer's work.

As for the once-revolutionary 'Agon,' after more than half a century, its lessons and revelations have been so absorbed into the language of ballet that it now seems almost conventional.

Once, Pina Bausch was about something, however disagreeable.

'The Leaves Are Fading' had something of a vogue when Antony Tudor made it in 1975, largely because of Gelsey Kirkland's ravishing performance.

After all these years of saying the same thing about the Alvin Ailey company - terrific dancers, awful repertory - I'm finally accepting the inevitable: I'm not going to change my mind, and they're not going to change their ways. And why should they, given their juggernaut success all over the world?

What guarantees - or at least semi-guarantees - good ballets is good choreographers, and they are thin on the ground.

'Neverwhere,' by Benjamin Millepied, is set to his favorite composer, Nico Muhly.

Ballet Hispanico is far from Irish, and, though it has strong dancers, its Spanishness has always left me unconvinced.