"Guy Noir: The Ballet" (James Sewell Ballet)

2) "James Sewell Ballet" at The Music Hall, Portsmouth N.H., March 11, 2006. In its New England debut, Minneapolis-based choreographer Sewell taps into everyone's stoical favorite prairie home detective with the "Guy Noir Ballet" narrated by Twin Cities neighbor Garrison Keillor. Also on the program are Sewell's "Anagram," and "Involution," based on the movement vocabularies of yoga and Qui gong.

3) "Tchaikovsky Ballet and Orchestra," at Cutler Majestic Theatre, Boston, Mass., March 14-15, 2006. Perm, from where the Tchaikovsky Ballet and Orchestra hails, has developed important dancers for generations, many of whom have gone on to the Kirov in St. Petersburg or to dance in the west. This gigantic company-125 dancers and musicians-is on a swing through the U.S. with productions of both "Sleeping Beauty" and "Swan Lake." The real question is whether this is a thoughtful classical company or another dreary Russian-ballet-for-tourists export. One thing is certain: there will be lots of Russian spoken in the Cutler theatre lobby.

4) "DanceBrazil" at the Zeiterion Theatre, New Bedford, Mass., March 16-17, 2006. The martial and often macho traditions of capoeira is at the base of many of hip hop dancing's most spectacular power moves. Although DanceBrazil director Jelon Vieira has been criticized for reducing his dancers to "pouty posturing and romantic aggression," at its best, the athleticism of DanceBrazil presents Bahia's fusion of African and Indian cultures as a source of power and delight.

5) "House Music Project" at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Kresge Little Theater, Cambridge, Mass., March 16-19, 2006. In this experimental program, M.I.T professor Tommy DeFrantz, a troupe of student breakdancers, student house dancers and a local DJ, perform wearing an apparatus that cues house music samples, breakbeats and photographs from a digital archive. Simultaneously, digital motion capture systems built at the University of Texas Dallas will add a dancing avatar to the environment, "pushing the funk into the future." The technology itself, designed by M.I.T alums Eto Oro and James Tolbert will be demoed for the public in April.

6) "Island Moving Company's Consent to Gravity" at the Tower Auditorium at Massachusetts College of Arts, Boston, Mass., March 17-18, 2006. Last year's Providence performances of this work, made to explore the grisly surrealism, music-score like sketches, and aesthetic pronouncements of late artist Frederick Sommer, brought Boston choreographers Daniel McCuksker and Carol Somers together with the performers of Newport's Island Moving Company. Chris Eastburn's score for the Providence String Quartet was one of the most successful new musical works for dance I've heard in ages.

7) "Boston Ballet in Fille Mal Gardee and Grand Slam" at the Wang Theatre, Boston, Mass., March 9-10 and 16-26, 2006. Wrapped up in ribbons and scratching with the chickens, Sir Frederick Ashton's cheerfully rustic "La Fille Mal Gardee" talks about the hijinks of an "unchaperoned girl" in the days before such teens had access to cell phones or instant messaging. BB's production is being staged once again by the original Alain, Alexander Grant, the dancer to whom the choreographer bequeathed rights to the work. The next week, the company's edgier repertory program is highlighted by Mark Morris' "Up and Down," a world premiere to -- of all things -- a saxophone piece by Glazunov, along with "Etesian," the local choreographic debut of former Ballett Frankfurt principal Helen Pickett, whose take on William Forsythe's extreme technique and brainy improvisational strategies looks more tender than that of her mentor. This is a program that the dancers are bound to love performing

8) "Tenth Anniversary Summer Stages Dance Gala" at the Concord Academy, Concord, Mass., March 26, 2006. More than a posh canapes and wine affair, the dancing at this gala benefit includes brief performances by many of the artists who directors Richard Colton and Amy Spencer have brought to Summer Stages in the past: David Parker and the Bang Group, sultry former Boston Ballet ballerina Adriana Su?z and her husband, choreographer Gianni Di Marco, plus a special joint appearance of what is billed as three generations of impressive male dancers in the powerful and sometimes contentious Daniel Nagrin, thoughtful choreographer David Dorfman and Concord Academy wunderkind Zack Winokur.

9) "Susan Sgorbati's Emergent Improvisation" at the Flynn Center, Burlington, Vt., March 30-31, 2006. Swarming bees, migrating birds and schools of fish seem to be able to coordinate their movements without effort. These inborn abilities enthrall Vermont choreographer Susan Sgorbati, whose current work is based on ideas about neurobiology and self-organizing systems proposed by Nobel laureate Gerald M. Edelman and his colleagues at La Jolla's Neurosciences Institute. She also discusses how contemporary theories have influenced her improvisational strategies in a free lecture March 27, 2006.

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