E-Mail This Article to a Friend Turning point? Dance moves of the year BY JEFFREY GANTZ

The city’s major dance organization, Boston Ballet, had a good year on stage, and its downsized Nutcracker at the Colonial Theatre was well received by the critics, though how the company will cope with the smaller box office for its holiday moneymaker remains to be seen. The year also brought George Balanchine icon Suzanne Farrell to Harvard, and the Celebrity Series brought the usual suspects to Boston. Here’s the best of 2004 as seen by Marcia B. Siegel and Jeffrey Gantz.

1) Straight and not so straight

Now 30 years old, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo has brought travesti dancing to new levels of sartorial excellence and bad taste. Its Celebrity Series performances at the Majestic Theatre featured the classical branch of the Trockadero’s extensive repertory, with numbers ranging from the Romantic period (Grand Pas de Quatre) through Imperial Russia (act two of Swan Lake and a pastiche ripped from Raymonda) to the early 20th century (The Dying Swan) and a contemporary throwback (Tarantella). When one of the Trocks does a series of whipping fouettés with interpolated double tours, it seems more virtuosic than a ballerina cranking out 32. And you could appreciate the skill of the klutzy jumps, skewed balances, and musical pratfalls even as you were laughing at them.

2) Troubled sleep

In Prometheus Dance’s Dreams, which was presented at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, things start out with a grain of sense, then smoothly slide off into regions where logic doesn’t apply. Using the formal devices of choreography, Diane Arvanites-Noyes and Tommy Neblett suggested the way a dreamer treads among his or her most dangerous fears and unsettling fantasies, steadied by the certainty of returning to ordinary life.

3) Musicale

Every performance by Mark Morris is a musical treat. This choreographer has terrific instincts for old and new repertory seldom heard in the concert hall, and he insists on live music. His program at the Shubert Theatre, in a Celebrity Series presentation, featured two pieces new to Boston, All Fours (Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4) and the Morris solo Serenade (Lou Harrison’s Serenade for Guitar), along with A Spell (John Wilson’s Renaissance madrigals) and Grand Duo (Harrison’s Grand Duo for Violin and Piano). It was the kind of post-ethnic 20th-century music that brings out the best in Morris.

4) Grande dame

Based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas fils, Val Caniparoli’s The Lady of the Camelias turned out to have a lot in common with its title heroine. Both the ballet and the bonbon were promiscuous characters with checkered pasts, and both seemed brittle, tart, and superficial when you first met them but improved on further acquaintance. Caniparoli’s undemanding choreography owed more to pair skating and gymnastics than to classical tradition, but his ballet had a pumping heart and a strong backbone and unconsumptive lungs, and after a performance or two to warm to the work, Boston Ballet’s production was worthy of customers, even at Paris-courtesan prices.

5) Keeper of the flame

The Harvard Theater Collection’s celebration of George Balanchine’s centennial included an appearance by his iconic ballerina Suzanne Farrell, who was interviewed by New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella. In the conversation, Farrell seemed delightfully un-neurotic about her mentor, mindful of his voice but determined to apply it in her own way to young dancers. And when she coached a former student who’s now a Harvard senior, she pointed out how a dancer’s small rhythmic adjustments and use of space could make the subtle difference between blandness and genius.

6) Divas

Dance for the older dancer isn’t a new idea anymore. Several groups have taken on the commendable mission of presenting men and women who’d be considered past their prime just when the rest of us are cruising up to it. Concord Academy’s "3 Women Solo" was an extraordinary such occasion, giving us three unparalleled stars together in the same room. Sara Rudner, Martine Hamel, and Carmen de Lavallade just don’t have anybody in the same league with them. And in the Summer Stages presentation, each woman’s solo was totally in command and in the moment.

7) On with the Shrew!

With its verbal fireworks, The Taming of the Shrew is not a play that’s easily tamed to the ballet stage, and John Cranko’s 1969 version is more generic and less original than his staging of Aleksandr Pushkin’s Yevgeny Onegin. Acting is what drives Cranko’s Shrew, and the particulars that the company’s dancers supplied — especially the four Kates, Larissa Ponomarenko, Pollyana Ribeiro, Adriana Suárez, and Lorna Feijóo, and the comedy of Mindaugas Bauzys and Gianni Di Marco — are what drove this production. As in 1995, when it first staged this work, Boston Ballet saw past its Bianca-like "sweet beauty" to the Kate-like "lusty wench" at its heart.

8) Dream TV

We got two revered adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. George Balanchine’s 1962 full-length ballet was captured in a 1966 video that was then reformatted for television, whereupon Balanchine disowned it; a newly spruced-up video version received a rare screening at Lincoln Center in October. Sir Frederick Ashton’s one-act translation of Shakespeare’s play was choreographed in 1964, and PBS aired a production done at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in the summer of 2003, another treat, though the fluid, confusing thing that Ashton was pursuing succumbed to the realism of "live" TV. No such reservations applied to PBS’s American Masters: Balanchine, an excellent two-hour bio that was made in 1984, shortly after Mr. B’s death, and hadn’t been seen since its initial airing.

9) Smaller is better?

That question was still up in the air — but give Boston Ballet credit for turning the loss of its usual venue at the Wang Theatre into an opportunity when it moved its Nutcracker into the smaller Colonial for this holiday season. The Colonial put the audience in a much better relationship to the stage and also to itself. Artistic director Mikko Nissinen cut out a lot of busywork and clutter that the ballet had accumulated at the hands of many previous arrangers, and he strengthened the through-line. And though the production was less fortunate in its design elements, there were some spectacular moments of dancing, and that’s where the performers’ proximity to the audience paid off.

10) Best of the rest

Lorraine Chapman’s Authentic Histories in Crash Arts’ "Dance Straight Up" at the Tsai Performance Center; Joe Goode’s What the Body Knows at Northeastern; Antonio Gaddes’s flamenco Blood Wedding at the Majestic Theatre (Gaddes died this year); the Japan Society of Boston’s presentation of "Kabuki in Boston: Heisei Nakamura-za Theatre" at the Majestic; David Parker & the Bang Group at Concord Academy; and "An Evening of Dances by Marcus Schulkind" at Green Street Studios, which included Lorraine Chapman in Let Bygones Be.