Ballet dancers from the D.C. area auditioned last weekend for a new production of “Swan Lake” that will have an all-Black and brown cast.

A local group of Black dance teachers called The Collective has made it their mission to make ballet more inclusive.

The dance company’s drag game is “en pointe.”

Celebrate love, the power of Adele, and more.

In ‘4×4: Ephemeral Architectures,’ four jugglers and four ballet dancers share the stage in a performance that demonstrates the patterns generated in art.

He has one last ballet to go: Bowie & Queen.

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.

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.

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.

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.