This week we've got the classy (the Powell/Pressburger epic ballet masterpiece, The Red Shoes) to the trashy, as E Street plays 3D porn at midnight. We've also got the latest from the world's oldest active filmmaker, a potential guilty pleasure in the making from Liam Neeson, and more Academy Award nominee screenings. more ›

The yearly visits by the Mariinsky Ballet -- as in their Sleeping Beauty in 2010 and Don Quixote in 2009 -- are generally one of the highlights of the Kennedy Center's dance season, and this is certainly true of this week's production of the St. Petersburg company's classic Giselle. It is a choreography and staging that are instantly recognizable as the best that the classical ballet tradition has to offer — especially the ballet blanc of the second act, pictured at right — giving the spectator a sort of mythic image of what ballet is. more ›

Check out this excellent video featuring the Nationals' Racing Presidents, who followed Kojo Nnamdi as special guests at the (unfortunately orchestra-less) Washington Ballet production of The Nutcracker. There's just something about seeing Teddy's smiling mug in a Santa hat and and trying his best to keep proper ballet form and technique without losing his balance which makes everything seem okay. more ›

It turns out that ballet isn't so different from professional wrestling: both are choreographed, both take enormous physical tolls and both can make you a little crazy -- the former just has much smaller performers and far better music. It's odd to think of Darren Aronofsky's new film, Black Swan, a backstage thriller about professional ballet, as a companion piece to his last film, The Wrestler, a backstage melodrama about professional wrestling, with Natalie Portman playing a diminutive version of Mickey Rourke, only in less gaudy tights. But it's not entirely inaccurate. more ›

If you're a regular reader of DCist, you know that we're big Kojo Nnamdi fans. So you can imagine our excitement when we saw that Kojo would be making a special guest appearance during tonight's Washington Ballet's performance of The Nutcracker. more ›

Near the beginning of Star Wars, in the scene in which Luke and his uncle purchase C-3PO and R2-D2, they initially choose a different model rather than our plucky blue friend R2 from the lineup of droids. For just a moment -- before the one they do choose blows a gasket and Luke points to R2 and says, "What about that one?" -- the audience is filled with dread that after all they've been through, that the two droids might be separated again. Nearly the same thing happens at the start of Mao's Last Dancer, as Communist Party officials come into a rural Chinese classroom looking for potential recruits for the new national ballet program started by Chairman Mao's wife. They walk around the room, take stock of the children, and are nearly out the door when Li Cunxin's teacher grabs the coat of the dour official, points to Li, and says, "What about that boy?" more ›

Among the sometimes wacky performances of the Capital Fringe Festival are some unexpected offerings of the more mainstream variety, with a twist. An adventurous little company called Opera Alterna, which presented two new operas by local composers at last year's festival, returns with an earnest production of Thomas Pasatieri's 1967 melodrama Padrevia. The company is making the revival of Pasatieri's concise, neo-Romantic operas a specialty, after presenting two of them at the 2008 Fringe Festival. Pasatieri, writing his own libretto, adapted a tragic story from Boccaccio's Decameron, the first novella from Giornata IV, a day on which all the members of the brigata told stories of love that ended badly. Tancred, the Prince of Salerno, loves his only daughter, Gismonda, so much that he keeps her isolated from all other people in his palace. Reaching adulthood, she finds love by arranging to meet with Guiscardo, who tends the palace garden. Needless to say, Tancred catches the lovers in the act, leading to a violent conclusion, a verismo shocker that could pass at times as the fourth act of Puccini's Il Trittico. more ›

Apparently it's March tomorrow, and the pile-up of concerts one could hear this week is impressive. Here are some picks for all kinds of budgets. more ›

The Mariinsky Ballet returned to the Kennedy Center Opera House on Tuesday night for a run of performances of its classic production of The Sleeping Beauty. Classic can also be a nice way of saying tired, and this choreography by Marius Petipa, updated by Konstantine Sergeyev and Fedor Lopukhov, has the advantage of being a fairy-tale, wedding-cake piece of fluff and the disadvantage of the same. The company from St. Petersburg, which has apparently taken the final step toward shedding its Soviet past by dropping its former name of Kirov Ballet, is not willing quite yet to break with its past when its comes to the sacred cows (the premiere of Tchaikovsky's music and Petipa's choreography were given by the Mariinsky Theater in 1890). Whether you think that is good or bad depends on your tastes. more ›

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. more ›

The Mariinsky Ballet, the St. Petersburg company formerly known as the Kirov Ballet, brought its charming, old production of Don Quixote to Washington this week. Alexander Gorsky's adaptation of the classic 1869 choreography by Marius Petipa dates back to the first decade of the 20th century, and not much about it has changed since then. Anyone interested in the cutting edge of ballet is unlikely to be much taken with this bit of history, but for the ballet neophyte it would be a grand, agreeable introduction - a light-hearted, at times slapstick ballet in which the only suicide turns out to be fake. more ›

There is some excellent classical music to be heard this week, before the Inauguration Madness shuts down the District of Columbia. more ›

Washingtonians certainly have enough options to take in a performance of Tchaikovsky's evergreen Christmas ballet The Nutcracker this month. Given the choice this weekend, the more traditional extravaganza version offered by the Joffrey Ballet at the Kennedy Center lost out to the Washington Ballet's revival of Septime Webre's re-imagining of The Nutcracker at the Warner Theater. more ›

The legendary Kirov Ballet company is back at the Kennedy Center for a seven-performance engagement of La Bayadère. This 1941 three-act Soviet version of choreographer Marius Petipa's classic ballet was performed flawlessly by the company on opening night Tuesday. more ›