Author: Mary Beth

The American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House on Saturday, June 24.

I don't have much use for this sort of story: A beautiful, virginal young woman, seduced by an unscrupulous man, falls into disgrace and dies tragically — but beautifully, always beautifully — as penance for her sins of the flesh. It's so eye-rollingly Victorian and dull, truly dull, because the woman is inevitably a passive figure, and any story with a passive central figure is going to be dull.

But perhaps only dull from a literary or philosophic viewpoint. Manon taught me that, when it comes to choreography, a passive central figure can be just as beautiful as the Victorians would dream. I might have rolled my eyes at the dated histrionics of the story, but I held my breath at the loveliness of the dancing.

The American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House on Friday, June 9.

Countless little girls attended the American Ballet Theatre's performance of Cinderella Friday night, and I wonder what they thought of it. For those who only know Cinderella through Disney, Sergei Prokofiev's score might be something of a shock. Prokofiev, one of the masters of the twentieth century, was not a bibbidi-bobbidi-boo sort of composer, and he certainly didn't write anything for a chorus of shrill, squeaky mice. His Cinderella is darkly shaded, with some truly eerie moments. The midnight music, marking Cinderella's punishment for breaking curfew, sounds almost menacing, not physically so — this isn't a Grimm story with amputated toes and Hitchcockian birds — but psychologically. Prokofiev understands what it would mean to have the substance of your dreams vanish at the stroke of a clock.

James Kudelka's choreography, given its New York premiere by the American Ballet Theatre, beautifully captures Prokofiev's evocative music. Following the composer's lead, Kudelka eschews both the violent Grimm telling and the syrupy Disney version. His story has a haunting sense of fantasy, letting Cinderella's dreamworld seep into her reality, recede and then re-establish itself with greater strength and new maturity.

The New York City Ballet on Sunday, May 28.

I wanted to go to this particular New York City Ballet program because each segment was set to music by Igor Stravinsky. I knew the company's crisp neoclassic aesthetic would perfectly match Stravinsky's later music, and I was eager to see how the dancers would interpret Firebird, one of the composer's earliest works, written when he still indulged in romantic and primitivist styles. As it turned out, the company's Firebird was the last piece on the program and by far my least favorite of the afternoon. I was sorry to see it all end on such a disappointing note.