Thanks to the way the week is run, jury members will often form impressions about dancers' talent and personality and thus make up their minds about winners before the competition begins.
The ballet also happens to be a flamboyant showcase for a big company, and given that Stretton has apparently been coaching the Royal like a man possessed ever since he arrived, he can at least justify his opening production as a parade ground for his dancers' talent.
In "Sehnsucht," we got a taste of N.D.T.'s strength as a group, but here we were able to savor individual dancers' talents.
Circular fire stairs have long been illegal, but they now serve another purpose -- Mr. Rodgers says he can gauge his dancers' talents by how well they can descend those stairs.
The Royal Ballet, which, as funding elsewhere was cut to the bone, squandered its budget and its dancers' talents on ill-considered works such as Untouchable and Carmen, and an inexplicable revival of Raven Girl.
The best feature of today's Royal Ballet — as its recent quadruple bill of ballets by Frederick Ashton, Balanchine, Jerome Robbins and Christopher Wheeldon demonstrated — is that it is a haven for individual dancers of talent.
But Ms. Bennetts was right to take the chance of showing yet another facet of her dancers' considerable talents.
Suffice it to say that the concept was a brilliant way to use the dancers' physical talents in the service of a magic act — sexy, virtuosic.
Ms. Bouvier responds only in the most simplistic fashion to the music's rhythms, and her ensemble dances are repetitive unison exercises in time-filling running, falling, lifting and empty gesturing that never venture into compositional complexity, and make little use of the dancers' evident talents or ballet technique.
STEVENS--Tony. 63, director, choreographer, teacher, and dancer of extraordinary talent passed away July 12 of Hodgkins Lymphoma.
