New York City Ballet

The scene: Dancers with the New York City Ballet joined sup- porters of the Orange County Per- forming Arts Center on Wednesday to celebrate the company's 50th anniversary tour with a post- performance cast party at Scott's Seafood Grill & Bar in Costa Mesa. Hot spot: Serenaded by a jazz combo, dance buffs cruised a dessert crepe buffet, sipped wine and raved about the company's performance in works choreographed by George Balanchine, Peter Martins and Jerome Robbins.

Offering dance styles as varied as pure classical and contemporary and jazz, the Laguna Dance Festival is presenting an array of dancers from around the country this weekend. "This is the most expansive program we have ever had," said Jodie Gates, founder and artistic director of the festival, which is in its seventh season this year. Over four performances beginning Thursday, dancers from the New York City Ballet, the Colorado Ballet, San Francisco's Smuin Ballet and innovative companies including Philadelphia's BalletX and the River North Dance Chicago will perform in the intimate Laguna Playhouse.

George Balanchine's 1962 two-act ballet "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a strange collage of compressed, sometimes perfunctory narrative episodes and extended, often glorious pure-dance sequences. As a choreographic reduction of Shakespeare's comedy, it lacks the structural ingenuity and brilliant character-dance scenes that make Frederick Ashton's one-act ballet "The Dream" (choreographed two years later to some of the same Mendelssohn music) so satisfying.

What, no pointe shoes? Two things lead you to expect pointe shoes from Ballet du Grande Théâtre de Genève when the company arrives at the Music Center's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for performances next weekend. The first is the name - it's called ballet, right? Sure, the women of today's ballet companies take off the boxy satin footwear sometimes for contemporary work, but ballet in a company moniker still implies that pointe shoes rule. The second is the company's Los Angeles program, which includes three works by French dancer-choreographer Benjamin Millepied, widely known as choreographer for the 2010 movie "Black Swan" - featuring his take on that very pointe -intensive classical ballet "Swan Lake.

"This is Belmont!" Peter Martins said, laughing. The New York City Ballet's master-in-chief was comparing his company to a stable of racehorses, the same way he did when they appeared in Costa Mesa four years ago. Actually, it was George Balanchine--founder of the NYCB--who originated the comparison, said the Danish-born Martins (devastatingly handsome in black tie). "Racehorses are very strong animals with fine, slender legs and small ankles. One misstep, and it's over!"

"I know that George Balanchine, who ... founded the company and guided it to such heights, would be proud of its ongoing success under Peter Martins.. . ." The words appear in the fancy souvenir program for the lavish, sprawling, ambitious, pretentious, ultimately disturbing 40th anniversary celebrations of the New York City Ballet. The omniscient voice uttering the happy all-purpose judgment emanates from an especially exalted haven of dance criticism: the White House.

The New York City Ballet is "close to concluding" arrangements to return to the Orange County Performing Arts Center in September, according to the company's executive director, William Wingate. Wingate did not say how long the troupe would perform in Orange County, nor did he disclose repertory. But he did confirm that the company is involved "in serious talks" to include Costa Mesa on its first West Coast visit since its one-week stint at the Center in October, 1986.

Amid a flurry of awards, speeches and tears, one of the last of the Balanchine-trained principals of the New York City Ballet, former Chatsworth resident Heather Watts, has retired. Watts, who was born in Long Beach and grew up in the San Fernando Valley, danced her last official performance at Lincoln Center in New York on Jan. 15. A gala party followed, with celebrities from the ballet world attending, as well as Watts' parents, Mr. and Mrs. Keith Watts of Chatsworth.

The New York City Ballet has spent a lot of time this week at the Orange County Performing Arts Center looking backward. With a resident ghost as potent as George Balanchine, that is as it must be. Saturday night, however, the company looked forward. It wasn't a particularly promising look. The best part of the performance came first--and it involved nothing more novel than a repetition of Balanchine's definitive Stravinsky translation: "Symphony in Three Movements" (1972).

Offering dance styles as varied as pure classical and contemporary and jazz, the Laguna Dance Festival is presenting an array of dancers from around the country this weekend. "This is the most expansive program we have ever had," said Jodie Gates, founder and artistic director of the festival, which is in its seventh season this year. Over four performances beginning Thursday, dancers from the New York City Ballet, the Colorado Ballet, San Francisco's Smuin Ballet and innovative companies including Philadelphia's BalletX and the River North Dance Chicago will perform in the intimate Laguna Playhouse.

New York City Ballet Moves Where: Granada Theatre, Santa Barbara When: 8 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday Cost: $53 and $73 Information: (805) 893-3535 or http://www.artsandlectures.ucsb.edu Where: Valley Performing Arts Center, Northridge When: 8 p.m. Saturday Cost: $40 to $100 Information: (818) 677-3000 or http://www.valleyperformingartscenter.org

On a brisk January afternoon, there's an air of high spirits as dozens of American Ballet Theatre's dancers and staff gather in the largest studio of the company's Lower Manhattan headquarters. For two hours, as they run through ABT's newest full-length ballet, "The Bright Stream," bravura mixes with hilarity, as virtuoso turns alternate with comic vignettes. Numerous characters not usually found on the ABT stage — a tractor driver, a milkmaid and the denizens of a 1930s Soviet agricultural collective — express themselves with individuality and distinctive styles.

— Inside the Guggenheim Museum, the women were rapt, breathless even, as Nikolaj Hübbe, artistic director of the Royal Danish Ballet, strolled among them. On this March evening, beneath the magnificent spiral rotunda, their voices swirled with memories as they recalled the native Dane's 15 years as a dancer with the New York City Ballet. "Did you see his 'Apollo'? It was magical. " "He was the best Poet ever. " "I loved him in 'Sleeping Beauty.'" "At his last show, everybody in the audience had tears in their eyes.

In 1957, George Balanchine, co-founder and artistic director of New York City Ballet, revived his "Apollo," first created in 1928 for the Ballets Russes with an original score by Igor Stravinsky. The choreographer had summed up the piece as "a wild, untamed youth learns nobility through art. " That description could easily apply to dancer Jacques d'Amboise, who joined City Ballet at 15, was cast as Apollo eight years later and had 24 roles made for him during his three-plus decades with the troupe.

Dancer Benjamin Millepied, 33, comes off as a bit of a highbrow pawn in "Black Swan," Darren Aronofsky's award-winning ballet-horror film. One imagines his character's pale hands, lifting Natalie Portman, as dull and mean and clammy. Off-screen, however, Millepied has the world in a wide, warm embrace. Even before "Black Swan" launched his career as a film choreographer-actor and set in motion a whirlwind romance and engagement with Portman, he was gaining international renown for his dancing and his stylish, architectural choreography at New York City Ballet and beyond.

Nostalgia prevailed at the California African American Museum in Exposition Park, where a group of dancer-alumni gathered on Saturday to remember the vivacious New York ballet company, Dance Theatre of Harlem. Charismatic pioneering black ballet star Arthur Mitchell launched the troupe in 1969 in response to Martin Luther King's assassination. Post- 9/11 economic realities, however, undermined Mitchell's labor of love. While DTH's school still operates at 152nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue, the performing ensemble has been "on hiatus" since 2004.

Tanaquil Le Clercq, the legendary American ballerina whom poet Frank O'Hara once called "perfection's broken heart," died Sunday at New York Hospital at age 71. According to sources at the New York City Ballet, her home company, the cause of death was pneumonia. The fourth wife of choreographer George Balanchine, Le Clercq danced to great acclaim for his New York City Ballet in the 1940s and '50s.

George Balanchine always prized black swans. For the 1940 film comedy "I Was an Adventuress," he created a disarming "Swan Lake" sequence with Odette wearing a black tutu and the swan corps clad in traditional white. Forty-one years later, in his final production of the second act for New York City Ballet, he reversed that look--keeping Odette in white but surrounding her with 30 swans in gossamer black.

Kings Road Cafe was bustling on a recent mid-afternoon, and Melissa Barak was gratefully digging into a late lunch. Barak, a choreographer and leading dancer with Los Angeles Ballet, suggested Kings Road as a meeting spot because it's one of her favorite restaurants. It also happens to be a central locus among the nearby landmarks in Barak's young life. It's five blocks east from the cafe to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she was born 30 years ago, and a seven-minute walk to her childhood home near Melrose Avenue.