Kijun Times

Ballet can seem a matriarchal and matrilineal art. Behind the scenes, many of its teachers and coaches are women; onstage the choreography often glorifies the prima ballerina as a Platonic ideal of style and beauty from whom the whole company, indeed the whole art, derives meaning and purpose. A number of historically important companies were founded by women (the Royal Ballet, Ballet Rambert, American Ballet Theater). Yet today most of ballet’s artistic directors and almost all its choreographers are men.

This week brings three companies run by women: Ballet Memphis (whose artistic director is Dorothy Gunther Pugh) has a season at the Joyce Theater from Tuesday to Sunday; Ballet Next (artistic director, Michele Wiles) has a two-week season at New York Live Arts; and in Washington, the Suzanne Farrell Ballet has its annual season at the Kennedy Center.

What’s more, Ballet Memphis and Ballet Next bring some choreography by women. Ms. Wiles presents her “Ushuaia” and the world premiere of her “Don’t Blink” on Tuesday; Ballet Memphis (which in 2011 offered a program of all-female choreography) performs Julia Adam’s “Devil’s Fruit” and Gabrielle Lamb’s “I Am a Woman: Moult.” These aren’t companies with especially feminist agendas; each will perform pieces by male choreographers too — notably Brian Reeder for Ballet Next and Matthew Neenan for Ballet Memphis. Both Ms. Adam and Mr. Neenan know the Memphis dancers; these are not their first works for this company.

Walpurgisnacht at Halloween

Walpurgisnacht (end of April, welcoming spring) is at the opposite end of the calendar from Halloween (end of October, preparing for the darker months). But both are associated with witches and the supernatural; so it seems not wrong but right that Suzanne Farrell chooses this weekend to revive George Balanchine’s “Walpurgisnacht Ballet,” to ballet music from Gounod’s opera “Faust.”

Balanchine made several versions of this work over the decades; in his final one, in 1975, which he revised in 1980 for Ms. Farrell, a vision of powerfully alluring femininity builds to a tempestuous climax (all the women loosen their hair). Ms. Farrell also stages Balanchine’s “Emeralds,” the pas de deux from the Act II divertissement in his “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”; and the balcony scène d’amour from “Romeo and Juliet” (to Berlioz) by Maurice Béjart, with whose company she danced for several years.

But it’s never Béjart Ms. Farrell means when she speaks of “Mr. B.” — or writes of him. “Emeralds” is the first ballet in Balanchine’s “Jewels,” and new terrain for her (she created the ballerina role in the final “Diamonds”). On the Kennedy Center website, she writes: “Each of the three sections in ‘Jewels’ makes a statement about a very specific style of walking; ‘Emeralds’ has a low, delicate walk marked by a slow, underwater weightiness. After its premiere, Mr. B eventually added another pas de deux for the first ballerina and a pas de sept at the end, bringing together the lead dancers once more to reiterate the walking motif and summarize the mesmerizing mood of the piece.” Just to have this degree of analysis, simple but eloquent, is a good primer for her season.

Butoh

Two variations on Japanese Butoh movement reach New York this week. Sankai Juku, the best-known exponent of Japanese Butoh, brings his “Umusuna: Memories Before History” (2012) to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Wednesday-Saturday). At Danspace at St. Marks, the Tokyo-born Mina Nishimura presents two works based on Butoh research (with the singular titles “Princess Cabbage” and “The Celery of Everything”) between Thursday and Saturday.

Hallberg at Performa 15

The biennial Performa season opens on Sunday night with the return to the stage of the long-injured David Hallberg in “Fortuna Desperata” at St. Bart’s Church, 325 Park Avenue. Created by the Italian filmmaker and artist Francesco Vezzoli, it’s described as “a dramatic illumination of the birth of ballet, exploring the form’s earliest incarnations in the royal courts of the Italian Renaissance.”

I wish it weren’t overloaded with the separate drama of Mr. Hallberg’s general absence from the stage. I note that his name is as yet unmentioned in American Ballet Theater’s May-July season at the Metropolitan Opera House, and that, even if he does rejoin the company then, there are few current “to be announced” gaps for him to fill.