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The National Ballet School of Canada appoints a new co-chief executive officer.

Grant Troop, who was the science centre’s chief operating officer and has a background in geology, will head the administration of the school, while co-CEO and long-time artistic director Mavis Staines will handle the artistic side.

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A reviewof 'Land of the Sweets: the Burlesque Nutcracker' by Katherine Luck for Crosscut.

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There isn’t really a plot to The Burlesque Nutcracker per se; just a series of dances loosely held together by Drosselmingus’s retro, “Live from the Playboy Club” style of patter. McCann’s co-producer, Lily Verlaine, is the person responsible for the flash of class found in the choreography. A ballet and burlesque dancer who has performed with the likes of Dita Von Teese, Verlaine finds a way to make each of the familiar dances from the original ballet simultaneously sexy and silly. It’s an intoxicating combination, allowing the audience to indulge in the immature urge to giggle while ogling the ever-increasing exposure of flesh.

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The year in dance by Gia Kourlas in The New York Times.

At Ballet Theater, which is overrun with guest stars, there is a new generation of dancers that could become the next decade’s top artists, if they are cultivated for the long haul. Along with the formidable Ms. Messmer are company members Cory Stearns, Hee Seo, Isabella Boylston and Joseph Gorak, who recently won the Erik Bruhn Prize. Can feet make you gasp? Mr. Gorak’s do.

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<sub>A review of American Ballet Theatre by Leigh Witchel in The New York Post.

Painted on the curtain of Alexei Ratmansky’s “The Nutcracker” is a pretty little house, only it’s tilted askew. It’s the perfect metaphor for this take on the ever-present holiday tale, told by a man who sees things with a child’s eyes.

This production bowed last Christmas, and while Ratmansky says he hasn’t changed any of the choreography, someone must have sprinkled enchanted snow on it because everything looks better.</sub>

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A review of English National Ballet'sNutcracker by Clement Crisp in The Financial Times.

This version of the duet is over-complicated: my early and sublime Sugar Plums were Markova and Danilova, who did not need to climb Everest to persuade us that they were great ballerinas, and Klimentová is too fine an interpreter, too musical and too felicitous in manner, to have to negotiate the obstacles of this assault course. Muntagirov, elegant, charmingly unfazed by deathtrap steps, is handsome, attentive, easy master of his choreography, a prince, a treasure.

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A preview of Northern Ballet's "Beauty and the Beast" by Chris Bond in The Yorkshire Post.

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Now, Northern Ballet is following up the success it enjoyed with Cleopatra earlier this year with a new production of Beauty and the Beast choreographed by its artistic director David Nixon.

“I wanted to create a family show which would be equally popular with children and adults,” he says. “This is not an adaptation of the Disney version of the story – it is based on the original tale and will embrace the darker elements of the tale as well as the lighter moments."

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A National Public Radio feature on "Apollo's Angels," republished from earlier in the year.

"Louis XIV realized that if his art form was going to be disseminated throughout his realm and even to other European countries, he would have to find a way to write it down," Homans explains. "So he asked [choreographer] Pierre Beauchamp to write some these positions. The positions themselves are the grammars of ballet, they're the ABC's, the classical building blocks of ballet."