For Joseph Walsh, there was never any question of what he would be when he grew up. His older sister was a dancer, and by the time Joseph was three years old he was accompanying her to Nutcracker performances. "I remember being backstage and the snow ended," he says. "I started rolling around in endless piles of snow, and it was the most fun I ever had. From then on, I asked my parents if I could start taking classes."

Lessons in tap, jazz and Modern followed before he started to zero in on his ballet training.

The moment that solidified his path to a professional dance career came at age 14 when he performed at the Lincoln Center in New York City. "It was the first time I performed for more than 200 people at a time." The feeling of being on a stage of such magnitude was one close to euphoria, one he's been chasing ever since.

Since joining the professional company in 2007, Joseph's had the opportunity to dance a wide range of roles. One of his favorites includes his part in Sir Kenneth MacMillian's Manon. "It was the first three-act ballet I had to carry with a female lead. I was one of those things like the Lincoln Center performance where I had to get over this mental stage fright and realize I got this. When the performance was over, it was so satisfying."

He's also recently had acclaimed performances in Stanton Welch's The Rite of Spring and La Bayadere, but it was his leading role in last June's Rome and Juliet that captured our hearts. As Romeo, he displayed the refined elegance and gentle power that has come to characterize his dance.

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Friday is the second night of a two-day run by Grupo Corpo. In 1988, choreographer Rodrigo Pederneiras had a career-defining moment: "I started thinking about what it would be like to make a dance that would be more inside our body." Grupo Corpo, now making its Houston debut courtesy of the Society for the Performing Arts, has been exploring that idea ever since. Pederneiras, part of the family that founded the Grupo Corpo dance troupe, incorporates elements of classical ballet, capoeira, samba and ballroom dance into his contemporary choreography in what's been called "an intensely Brazilian way." The Grupo Corpo style is easily identifiable, marked by loose-jointed, swiveling hips and swift and precise footwork, with low leaps and lifts. The dancers are often attired in bodysuits that have been painted with various signs and symbols.

During its stop in Houston, the company presents ímã (which means "magnet" in Portuguese) and Sem Mim (which means "without me" in Portuguese). ímã is set to a jazzy score by the Brazilian trio +2, while Sem Mim features an original score composed by Carlos Núñez, a traditional Galician bagpipe player.

Grupo Corpo performs at 8 p.m. Friday at the Wortham Theater Center, 501 Texas. For information, visit the SPA Web site or call 713-227-4772. $35 to $65.

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Photo by Pam Francis

Houston Ballet Artistic Director Stanton Welch

We've had several magical experiences courtesy of Stanton Welch and the Houston Ballet. We count his Marie, Madam Butterfly, the recent La Bayadère and the current production of The Rite of Spring as some of the best performances we've had the pleasure to witness. Not just dance performances, mind you. Performances, period. We're convinced Welch can do just about anything, and like readers eagerly waiting for a new book from their favorite author, we're always anxious to see what he does next.

We don't doubt Welch has plenty of his own ideas for ballets, but we've got a wish list for new work we'd like to see him create, starting with Fantine, the story of the Les Misérables character played so perfectly for the 2012 movie by Anne Hathaway. The film was very much a vehicle for Hugh Jackman, and we didn't mind that, but we would have loved to seen more of Fantine's backstory. Hollywood wasn't going to add to the two-and-a-half hour film and let's face it, very, very few of us are going to dig through Victor Hugo's almost 1,500 page epic novel for bits of her story. Enter Welch and the Houston Ballet. Physically, Fantine was frail and strong at the same time, which sounds just like a ballerina to us. We'd love to see Fantine as a young woman in love, happy - for a time - with her lover and to see her with Cosette before being forced to leave the child with the wretched Thenardiers. What a wonderfully dramatic story arc, taking Fantine from a beautiful and happy young woman to a desperate, hopeless prostitute, all the while she's clinging to her virtue and hoping for a better life for her child. And what a death scene!

Please, Stanton, give us Fantine.

Anne Hathaway in Les Misérables

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Photo by Amitava Sarkar

Artists of Houston Ballet.

The Setup:
For the centennial of Vaslav Nijinky's monumental The Rite of Spring, Houston Ballet's Stanton Welch takes the tribal elements of the original dance of ritual sacrifice and magnifies them a hundred times over. The costuming and set design of the 1913 Paris debut is reminiscent of Eastern European folk garb, positing it in a somewhat familiar Western context. Welch, however, has drawn inspiration from his native Australia for his backdrop.

The Execution:
The art of indigenous Australian Rosella Namok is used to set the piece in a time and place before the presence of the West. The costumes and make-up design are not strictly native Australian; there are hints of African and Native American tribal culture in the ornate hair and war paint. The otherness of the world of Welch's Spring serves to heighten the contrived naturalism of Nijinksy's choreography, for humans do not move with clenched fists and stomping feet any more than they do in a turned out position stepping toe to heel.

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Photo by Amitava Sarkar

Artists of Houston Ballet in "Kingdom of the Shades"

The Set-Up:
This past weekend, Houston Ballet concluded its run of Stanton Welch's La Bayadére (The Temple Dancer). The seven-performance engagement marked the second time the company has performed this extravagant story ballet set in Rajah-era India.

The Execution:
Watching La Bayadere is like watching a Victorian storybook come to life. Think Rudyard Kipling meets Hans Christian Anderson if Kipling had been in the business of writing fairy stories rather than adventure tales. Peter Farmer's rich set and costume designs are evocative of Mother India without the slightest hint of kitsch exoticism. There are liberalities taken with the aesthetics, but as someone who's traveled that great country, the world onstage conjured up the sensory landscape in a way that felt culturally true to form.

La Bayadére is the story of Nikiya, the beautiful temple dancer who falls in love with the brave warrior Solor. As a servant of the gods, however, Nikiya is unable to pursue the growing passion in her heart. Their predicament is further complicated when Solor is rewarded for his bounty with the hand Gamzatti, the Rajah's eldest daughter. Gamzatti, as it turns out, is one jealous princess. The best villainesses have a minion, and Gamzatti has her own in the handmaiden Ajah. The two devise Nikiya's death, a devious and sinister scheme that involves a poisonous serpent.

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Artists of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal.

The Set-Up:
On February 1 and 2, Houston Ballet presented Les Grands Ballets Canadiens De Montréal at the Wortham Theater Center as part of its Cullen Series. The company, which made its second Houston appearance this past weekend, performed two works choreographed by Mauro Bigonzetti.

The Execution:
The verve and cleverness of Bigonzetti's choreography is immediately felt in Four Seasons, the first of the program's two pieces, as the rising curtain reveals a landscape of serpentine bodies twisting and reaching in every direction. Bigonzetti's greatest achievement is making relevant one of the most familiar compositions in the classical music canon. Vivaldi's Four Seasons is so widely used, it's almost banal. But the dance here suggests otherwise. The movement is punctuated by stomps and audible beats of flesh, which keeps the audience focused on the dancers and their lines. With a piece such as Vivaldi's, it is easy to choreograph the dance to the notes, to make the dance submissive to the music. However, Bigonzetti's choreography, though musically inclined, is independent and at times even rebellious. This is the perfect example of Martha Graham's theory that music should not inform dance, but offer a setting for it to exist.

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Photo by Amitava Sarkar

Amy Fote performing for the Houston Ballet

The Houston Ballet's adventurous programming and performances earned the company a 2013 Texas Medal of the Arts in the field of Dance. Awarded by the Texas Cultural Trust, the medal recognizes the group's creativity, talent and contribution to the state's arts scene.

Central to the company's success has been Stanton Welch, the Houston Ballet artistic director of since 2003. From the first work he created for the company, Indigo in 1999, to the recent landmark evening-length work Marie (2011), Swan Lake (2006) and this year's newly staged The Rite of Spring, Welch has pushed the boundaries both for his dancers and the audience. This season alone, Welch added six new works to the group's repertoire, including two world premieres. The season's company premieres include George Balanchine's Ballet Imperial, Mark Morris's Pacific and Twyla Tharp's The Brahms-Haydn Variations. Peter Pan and La Bayadère, both works created especially for Houston Ballet, are on the season's remaining schedule.

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Photo by Julie Lemberger

In Underland, eclectic videography, movement, and costume work together to build a world onstage

The Setup
In 2003, Sydney Dance Company commissioned Steven Petronio to create a ballet for them. Inspired by the music of Australian musician Nick Cave, his collaborator on this work, Petronio conceived Underland, a chilling piece exploring the dark motifs of Cave's music. The Sydney Dance Company's license on Underland recently ended, and last Friday evening, thanks to the Society of the Performing Arts, Petronio's own company brought this world to life in the Wortham Theater Center.

The Execution
A web of ropes hangs from the rafters, motionless. Three rectangular screens loom in the background. As light creeps onto the stage, so creeps a man slowly down the web, his legs bent out like a frog's. The screen farthest from him shows a close-up of him in his descent, while sped-up clips of fire, marches, funerals, and streets sputter across the adjacent two. It's enchanting, yet disorienting - it's our welcome to Underland.

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The Wife With One F is a ballet fan and has been trying to interest me in attending some of Houston's by-all-accounts excellent performances for years. My opinion on the matter is that if I want to see superhuman feats of grace and agility, I'll just turn on lucha libre on Telemundo, but she tells me that that isn't the same thing. Must be something about the music, I guess.

Mentioning this to my brother over the holidays, he mused that perhaps the Dragon Quest ballet would tour the States, and I perked right up. Dragon Quest (Released as Dragon Warrior here in 1989) never really developed the depth and brilliance of Final Fantasy, but it's still a good old-fashioned kill the dragon, rescue the princess story. It's a damn sight deeper than The Nutcracker, that's for sure, and the Star Dancers Ballet in Japan apparently thought so, too, because they performed the thing like clockwork every year from 1995 to 2002.

Even better, they released a DVD of the performance and a helpful YouTube user uploaded the whole thing in 12 parts for you to peruse for free. It's honestly quite epic, and really brings the story of Erdrick and his descendants to life that challenges the game itself. As games get closer and closer to being considered art, it made me wonder what other titles would make good ballets.

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Photo by Andis Applewhite

The Setup:
On December 15 and 16, Earthen Vessels, The Sandra Organ Dance Company presented its holiday production Amahl and the Night Visitors at Houston Ballet Center for Dance's Margaret Alkek Williams Dance Lab. Adapted from the 1951 NBC telecast, Amahl combined opera, ballet and American Sign Language for a unique Christmas entertainment experience.

The Execution:
Amahl and the Night Visitors is a Christmas fable about a young boy who has a penchant for fabricating tall tales. He is full of wild energy and playful antics to the point that he exasperates his stern, but loving mother. Amahl is like all other boys, except that he is physically handicapped and must rely on a crutch to move around. His disability doesn't dampen his spirits, as personified by Lauren Perrone Bay who fills her performance with delightful charm and innocent mischief.

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