For another, he said, "We already have a good selection of dancers here, not to speak of the special talent for dance that exists among Russians.
Calmly, modestly, Mr. Wiseman's camera captures the professional skills with which today's Parisian dancers rehearse a wide selection of repertory.
(Anderson Meredith Monkk in Conversation (Monday) This unclassifiable and ever-imaginative composer, singer, choreographer, dancer and director performs selections from her repertory and discusses her career with the arts curator John Killacky.
In "Can't it really be helped?," Mr. Hong's best selection, the dancers waved plastic birds on poles but put them aside to muster a cross between a zombie folk dance and a music video routine.
At first glance, a visitor might have mistaken the last-minute selection of dancers as chaotic, but a closer look at Ballet Hispanico and its inner workings reveals that things were well under control.
The dancers wore an annoyingly whimsical selection of clown and carnival outfits (tulle skirts, striped tights, hair in bunches, a skeleton suit), and began a series of mimed sequences in response to annoyingly whimsical, unconvincingly enunciated commands and comments.
Mr. Burnside, a now 53-year-old dance teacher and former dancer with Bella Lewitzky and a wide selection of experimentalist New York choreographers, was probably suffering from a dislocation of a dancer's precise sense of space.
Does it have the world's best selection of male principal dancers?
"We're not just looking for dancers," Mr. Ludden said of the selection process.
In some ways the mix of styles, skills and training within this group of dancers represented the kind of random selection you would get from conscription.
