Myra Melford. Photo: Roger Burns.

There's an exuberant kickoff party on May 6, 2006, and an open house at the Dance Complex May 21, 2006.There are performances by professionals and amateurs, tango on the Weeks Bridge, and workshops in genres ranging from African traditions to something called Moon Salutations. Best bets include the Tuesdays at Noon series at the Dance Complex and workshops by gorgeous mover Lacina Coulibaly from Burkina Faso.

1. "9 Evenings Reconsidered," and "The Choreographic Turn," at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT, Cambridge, Mass., May 4- July 9, 2006. "9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre & Engineering, 1966," commemorates the landmark event where Bell Laboratories physicist Billy Kluver paired Judson dancemakers plus John Cage and David Tudor with a group of intrepid engineers to create new multimedia works. "The Choreographic Turn" features video installations by Daria Martin and Peter Welz exploring the improvisational "kinetic architecture" of choreographer William Forsythe, including works generated by cameras mounted on Forsythe's moving body. A lively schedule of public events associated with these dance-themed exhibits include a long overdue screening of WGBH's early video dance work on May 24, 2006 with Susan Dowling, former director of the WGBH New Television Workshop. If only Boston's public television station would reinstate this experiment!

2. "Boston Ballet Evening of Russian Ballet," at the Wang Theatre, Boston, Mass., May 4-7, 2006. OK, it was probably time for Boston Ballet to schedule Anna Pavlova's signature "Dying Swan" solo and the trashy-but-fun Soviet era "Spring Waters" duet by Asaf Messerer, but the insiders know that the real gem on the Boston Ballet's Russian program is Bronislava Nijinska's starkly primitivist 1923 "Les Noces (The Wedding),"staged by the Paris Opera Ballet's former ballet master Aleth Francillon.

3. "Rebecca Rice Dance," at Tsai Performance Center, Boston, Mass., May 6, 2006. Rebecca Rice regularly choreographs for the Boston Ballet's second company, but her own troupe's performance on the Celebrity Series' Marquee series is something of a plum. Catch this one-night-only repertory program featuring "Deep Dances," with a newly commissioned score by Pulitzer-prize winner John Harbison, performed live by Emmanuel Feldman and Pascale Delache-Feldman of the cello and bass duo, "Cello e Basso."

4. "Caitlin Corbett Dance Company," at Boston University Dance Theater, Boston, Mass., May 5-7, 2006. Caitlin Corbett's "Yield" is a topless duet that evens the playing field between professional female dancer Nicole Pierce and her non-dancing boyfriend Victor Tiernan. Awkwardness is made elegant in "Little Known Facts" to music by Western Massachusetts-based musicians "The Books," who weave found sounds into their edgy originals.

5. "Ann Carlson's CAke," at Radcliffe Institute Agassiz House, Cambridge Mass., May 8-26, 2006. Do you know where your consumer products come from? Do you care? Brainy choreographer Ann Carlson has spent her year as a Radcliffe fellow researching the global flow of production and how workers move as they go about their jobs. The result is a video and dance piece that investigates the repetitive movements of Taylorist factory work and ideas about how we experience our subliminally orchestrated retail experiences.

6. "Boston Ballet Carmen," at the Wang Theatre, Boston, Mass., May 11-21. 2006. Mikko Nissinen puts his career as artistic director on the line by commissioning his countryman Jorma Elo's first ever story ballet: a new "Carmen" in which Carmen is a supermodel, Don Jose is a corporate exec and Escamillo is a Formula One race car driver. Haute couture-influenced costumes -- by Joke Visser -- and sets by Walt Spangler, who provided the environment for the company's refurbished "Nutcracker" complete the vision. Compared to this, Balanchine's pristine "Serenade" on the same program will seem like a palate-cleansing sorbet.

7. "Dance Straight Up!" at Zero Arrow Theatre, Cambridge, Mass., May 11-14, 2006. CRASHarts' local showcase of world premieres has narrowed down to a two-program event, with the Anatolian-folkdance inspired work of Ahmet L?s "Collage" performing May 11 and at the May 14 matinee and elegant dancer Lorraine Chapman, The Company, sharing a program with gifted improviser Debra Bluth+ The Same Sea on the evenings of May 12-13, 2006.

8. "Knock on the Sky," at the Flynn Space, Burlington, Vt., May 19-20, 2006. Pianist Myra Melford, butoh dancer and choreographer Dawn Saito, and Austrian architect Michael Haberz explore struggle and persistence through the lens of Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus" and Kobo Abe's "Women in the Dunes" in this multimedia dance, music and video installation. On May 20, 2006 there's a free pre-concert conversation with the artists.

9. "Project Bandaloop," at The Shubert Theatre, Boston, Mass., May 13-14, 2006. Hanging by a thread and by fingernails, swinging on a hope and a prayer, rock climbers seem to court disaster but manage to ascend up mountains in ways that make them creatures of both earth and air. San Francisco-based choreographer Amelia Rudolph sees her aerial work with Project Bandaloop as extending beyond atheticism to create rituals of awareness of the natural and built environment.

10. "Prometheus Dance," at Boston Conservatory Theatre, Boston, Mass., May 25-28, 2006. You can spend Memorial Day weekend in exotic locales by way of the music scheduled on this year's program by Prometheus Dance. There's Mongolian throat singing from Tuva, arctic music from Samiland in northern Finland, and the great Czech performer Iva Bittova, whose singing anchors "Troika," a dance that takes three sister types from frenzied youth (dancers from Prometheus' main troupe) to entangled, deadpan seniority (as danced by members of the Prometheus Elders Ensemble).

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